What is Spring Boot Actuator?
Spring Boot Actuator is a module that adds production ready features for monitoring and managing your app through built in endpoints. It exposes things like health status, metrics, environment details, and more over HTTP. It is widely used to let monitoring tools and load balancers check whether an application is healthy.
- Spring Boot Actuator adds production ready endpoints for monitoring and management.
- It exposes health, metrics, and info about a running application.
- Endpoints can be secured and selectively enabled.
What it provides
- health: is the app up and are its dependencies reachable.
- metrics: memory, CPU, request counts, and timings.
- info: custom details about the build and app.
- env: the current configuration values.
You add it with the spring boot starter actuator dependency, then choose which endpoints to expose. The health endpoint is commonly used by load balancers to route traffic only to healthy instances.
Stress security. Actuator endpoints can reveal sensitive details, so in production you expose only what you need and protect them. Raising that concern unprompted marks you as someone who thinks about real deployments.
Frequently asked questions
What does the health endpoint do?
It reports whether the application and its dependencies, like the database, are up. Tools and load balancers use it to check service health.
Are all actuator endpoints exposed by default?
No. For safety only a few, like health, are exposed over HTTP by default. You enable others explicitly through configuration.
Common follow up questions
Related interview questions
Want the full Spring Boot guide?
Read every Spring Boot concept with notes, diagrams, and code in one place. Track your progress as you go.
Open the Spring Boot guide All Spring Boot questions