Expose your Own Diagnostics
Your app has more to say: expose it with a custom Actuator endpoint!
🔸 TLDR
▪️ Add Spring Boot Actuator to your project 📦
▪️ Choose which endpoints should be exposed 🌐
▪️ Create a custom endpoint with @Endpoint ⚙️
▪️ Publish data with @ReadOperation 📤
▪️ Protect operational endpoints in production 🔐
🔸 TRUTH
Spring Boot Actuator gives you health checks, metrics, and monitoring endpoints out of the box.
But you are not limited to the default endpoints. 👀
Inspired by Vlad Mihalcea, Java Champion, here is how to expose your own application diagnostics through Actuator.
1️⃣ ADD SPRING BOOT ACTUATOR
This dependency enables Spring Boot’s monitoring and management infrastructure.
2️⃣ EXPOSE THE CUSTOM ENDPOINT
Expose only the endpoints you need. Using * is convenient locally, but it can reveal sensitive operational data in production. 🔐
3️⃣ CREATE YOUR CUSTOM ENDPOINT
@Endpoint defines the endpoint name, while @ReadOperation exposes data through an HTTP GET request.
The result becomes available at:
GET /actuator/hypersistence-optimizer
The endpoint can return useful diagnostics such as:
▪️ Missing JDBC batching configuration
▪️ Inefficient identifier strategies
▪️ Hibernate dialect mismatches
▪️ Dangerous in-memory pagination
▪️ Query plan cache recommendations
This turns internal technical knowledge into observable operational data. 🔎
🔸 TAKEAWAYS
▪️ Actuator is extensible, not just a collection of predefined endpoints.
▪️ Custom endpoints are useful for diagnostics, maintenance information, feature states, cache details, or application-specific events.
▪️ Keep the endpoint focused on operational information; not business APIs.
▪️ Do not expose every Actuator endpoint publicly.
▪️ Secure sensitive endpoints with Spring Security and restrict their network access.
▪️ For numeric monitoring and dashboards, prefer Micrometer metrics. For readable diagnostics and events, a custom Actuator endpoint can be a great fit.
Observability becomes much more valuable when it reflects the real behavior of your application; not only the JVM. 🚀
#Java #SpringBoot #SpringActuator #SpringFramework #Observability #Monitoring #Micrometer #Hibernate #JPA #SoftwareEngineering #BackendDevelopment
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