The Problem
So your team has developed and implemented the five principles of object-oriented design. You’re using Spring Framework as your dependency injection mechanism in your Java applications. You’ve tested the app, it’s been in production for some time now. But how is it doing? Is it healthy? Is it up and running? Oh sure, you can wait for a service desk call to come in, but wouldn’t it be much better if that call came in and you could say “yes, we’re aware of a problem and we’re working on it”? Some form of managing and monitoring your Java applications is moving from “nice to have” toward “essential”.
And when that ticket come in, your first thought. is to see if the app is actually running. You could check log files. You could log in to the app itself, oh wait, your credentials don’t allow you to log in to the production app. Is there a set of support credentials you can use? Where are they?
There has to be a better way.
There is. It’s called Spring Boot Actuator.