Actuator Articles
9 articles about Actuator. Explore Spring Boot implementation, design, and operations across related topics.
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How to Monitor HikariCP Connection Pool with Micrometer and Actuator in Spring Boot
Explains how to visualize the Micrometer metrics (active/idle/pending) exposed by HikariCP using Actuator and Prometheus, and how to design alerts that detect signs of connection exhaustion before a failure occurs.
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How to Display CI/CD Version Information in Spring Boot Actuator - Automatically Reflect Commit Hashes in /actuator/info with build-info and git.properties
This article explains how to configure the Maven/Gradle build-info plugin and git-commit-id-plugin to automatically reflect the running production version, commit hash, and build time in /actuator/info, along with example verification scripts to run after CI/CD deployment.
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How to Tune Embedded Tomcat Thread Count in Spring Boot - Deciding server.tomcat.threads.max, max-connections, and accept-count
This article explains at which stage of request handling server.tomcat.threads.max, threads.min-spare, max-connections, and accept-count take effect in Spring Boot 3.x's embedded Tomcat, and walks through a procedure for choosing values with evidence using Actuator's tomcat.threads.* metrics and load testing. It also covers alignment with HikariCP's maximumPoolSize and the differences when Virtual Threads are enabled.
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How to Create Custom Health Checks (HealthIndicator) and Custom Actuator Endpoints in Spring Boot
Learn how to integrate the health status of dependencies such as external APIs, databases, and message brokers into your custom health using a custom HealthIndicator, assign them to readiness/liveness via health groups, and add custom operational Actuator endpoints with @Endpoint. Includes verification with curl.
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How to Speed Up Spring Boot Application Startup - Reducing Time with CDS, AOT, and Lazy Initialization
Spring Boot apps starting too slowly, causing Pods to miss readiness probes, or breaking your focus during local rebuilds—this guide solves those problems with practical steps. Learn how to identify bottlenecks with Actuator startup, then progressively apply lazy initialization, AutoConfig exclusion, CDS, and AOT to consistently reduce startup time.
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How to Properly Configure and Tune HikariCP Connection Pool in Spring Boot - Why the Default of 10 Isn't Enough
A tuning guide to eliminate Connection is not available errors in Spring Boot's HikariCP. Covers the maximumPoolSize default of 10 versus the official formula (cores × 2 + 1), revisiting connectionTimeout from 30 seconds to 3 seconds, the relationship between maxLifetime and wait_timeout, and leak detection with leakDetectionThreshold, all with implementation examples. Includes comparative data showing how configuration review reduced the timeout error rate from 40% to 3%.
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How to Deploy a Spring Boot Application to Kubernetes
A step-by-step guide to deploying a Dockerized Spring Boot application to Kubernetes. Covers creating Manifests for Deployment, Service, ConfigMap, and Secret, as well as configuring Actuator health endpoints as livenessProbe/readinessProbe — practical patterns you can use in production.
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Visualizing Spring Boot Metrics with Prometheus and Grafana
A hands-on guide to collecting Spring Boot application metrics in Prometheus via Micrometer and visualizing them in real time on Grafana dashboards. Also covers custom metrics implementation examples (Counter and Gauge) and security considerations for production operation.
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Getting Started with Spring Boot Actuator
A practical guide covering everything from introducing spring-boot-starter-actuator, configuring health/info/metrics endpoint exposure, a minimal application.yml, Prometheus integration, to secure production-ready exposure configurations. A gentle summary for those touching Spring Boot Actuator for the first time.