Actuator is the feature that Spring Boot provides for monitoring and managing applications in the production environment. It has features for health checking, auditing, metrics tracking, HTTP tracking, showing environment variables, and dumping threads. In this section, we will explore some of these features and turn on those that we will need for monitoring our application.
First of all, for the use Actuator, we need to add the following dependencies to pom.xml:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>
At the time of writing, with JDK 8 we will also need to include the following dependency to avoid a compilation error:
<dependency>
<groupId>javax.interceptor</groupId>
<artifactId>javax.interceptor-api</artifactId...