I recently wrote a tutorial demonstrating how to leverage the integrations between Spring Boot Actuator and Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.11, posted here in the Pivotal content library.
 

Here is a quick summary of the articles content:

Adding Actuator to your Spring Boot application deployed on Pivotal Cloud Foundry gets you the following production-ready features:

• Health Check column & expanded information in Instances section
• git commit id indicator, navigable to your git repo
• Summary git info under Settings tab (also navigable to repo)
• Runtime adjustment of logging levels, exposed via Actuator endpoints
• Heap Dump*
• View Trace*
• View Threads, dump/download for further analysis*

* New in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.11

TL;DR: Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.11 provides some really nice integrations with Spring Boot Actuator-enabled applications/microservices, giving you vital tools for monitoring, introspection, and troubleshooting quickly and effectively.
 

Like this post? Follow me on Twitter for more! And be sure to check out the Related Posts below.

Related Posts:

• Spring Tip: Spring Boot Actuator /actuator endpoint
• Getting up & running quickly with Spring Cloud Sleuth
• T4SD (Tips 4 Spring Devs): How to get Spring Boot REST endpoints to speak XML
• Spring Tip: Request header filtering in @RequestMapping
• How to Create an Alexa Skill with Spring Boot & Cloud Foundry

Just a quick tip for the Spring fans out there…

If you’ve decided to try out Spring Boot Actuator – and if you haven’t you really should! – you may have run into one of two interesting hitches that are easily resolved:

1. You are unable to access any of the various Actuator endpoints (/beans, /env, et al)
2. You can access those endpoints and yet are unable to access /actuator, the primary (navigable) Actuator endpoint

Unable to access any Actuator endpoints

In the case of point #1 above, you may see this in your logs:

s.b.a.e.m.MvcEndpointSecurityInterceptor : Full authentication is required to access actuator endpoints. Consider adding Spring Security or set ‘management.security.enabled’ to false.

For testing, it’s adequate and acceptable to simply add the suggested entry to your app’s application.properties file:

management.security.enabled=false

This is far less likely to be a suitable solution for production apps, though. 🙂  Enabling Spring Security properly to secure access to your application is a far more production-ready option.

Unable to access /actuator

If you can load successfully the various Spring Boot Actuator endpoints but get a 404 error on /actuator, the primary (navigable) Actuator endpoint, you are hitting a different (yet also easily resolved) snag. The hint is in how I phrased the difficulty: the primary (navigable) Actuator endpoint.

In order to access /actuator, which uses hypermedia to provide a navigable structure of links to Actuator endpoints, you must include HATEOAS (spring-boot-starter-hateoas) on your classpath. Adding this to your POM will fix that nicely:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-hateoas</artifactId>
</dependency>

That’s all for now, but stay tuned (or follow me on Twitter) for more quick or lengthy Spring tips!

Cheers,
Mark

Click here for more information about Spring Boot Actuator.

Related Posts:

• Getting up & running quickly with Spring Cloud Sleuth
• Spring Tip: Request header filtering in @RequestMapping
• Using Spring Boot Actuator integrations with Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.11
• T4SD (Tips 4 Spring Devs): How to get Spring Boot REST endpoints to speak XML
• Building a Portable, Self-powering, Cloud-Connected IoT demo