32. Endpoints

32. Endpoints
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Actuator endpoints allow you to monitor and interact with your application. Spring Boot includes a number of built-in endpoints and you can also add your own. For example the health endpoint provides basic application health information.

The way that endpoints are exposed will depend on the type of technology that you choose. Most applications choose HTTP monitoring, where the ID of the endpoint is mapped to a URL. For example, by default, the health endpoint will be mapped to /health.

The following endpoints are available:

ID	Description	Sensitive
`autoconfig`	Displays an auto-configuration report showing all auto-configuration candidates and the reason why they “were” or “were not” applied.	true
`beans`	Displays a complete list of all the Spring Beans in your application.	true
`configprops`	Displays a collated list of all `@ConfigurationProperties`.	true
`dump`	Performs a thread dump.	true
`env`	Exposes properties from Spring’s `ConfigurableEnvironment`.	true
`health`	Shows application health information (defaulting to a simple “OK” message).	false
`info`	Displays arbitrary application info.	false
`metrics`	Shows “metrics” information for the current application.	true
`mappings`	Displays a collated list of all `@RequestMapping` paths.	true
`shutdown`	Allows the application to be gracefully shutdown (not enabled by default).	true
`trace`	Displays trace information (by default the last few HTTP requests).	true

	Note
	Depending on how an endpoint is exposed, the `sensitive` parameter may be used as a security hint. For example, sensitive endpoints will require a username/password when they are accessed over HTTP (or simply disabled if web security is not enabled).

32.1 Customizing endpoints

Endpoints can be customized using Spring properties. You can change if an endpoint is enabled, if it is considered sensitive and even its id.

For example, here is an application.properties that changes the sensitivity and id of the beans endpoint and also enables shutdown.

endpoints.beans.id=springbeans
endpoints.beans.sensitive=false
endpoints.shutdown.enabled=true

	Note
	The prefix "`endpoints` + `.` + `name`" is used to uniquely identify the endpoint that is being configured.

32.2 Custom health information

The default information exposed by the health endpoint is a simple “OK” message. It is often useful to perform some additional health checks, for example you might check that a database connection works, or that a remote REST endpoint is functioning.

To provide custom health information you can register a Spring bean that implements the HealthIndicator interface.

import org.springframework.boot.actuate.health.HealthIndicator;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class MyHealth implements HealthIndicator<String> {

    @Override
    public String health() {
        // perform some specific health check
        return ...
    }

}

Spring Boot also provides a SimpleHealthIndicator implementation that attempts a simple database test.

32.3 Custom application info information

You can customize the data exposed by the info endpoint by setting info.* Spring properties. All Environment properties under the info key will be automatically exposed. For example, you could add the following to your application.properties:

info.app.name=MyService
info.app.description=My awesome service
info.app.version=1.0.0

If you are using Maven, you can automatically expand info properties from the Maven project using resource filtering. In your pom.xml you have (inside the <build/> element):

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
        <filtering>true</filtering>
    </resource>
</resources>

You can then refer to your Maven “project properties” via placeholders, e.g.

project.artifactId=myproject
project.name=Demo
project.version=X.X.X.X
project.description=Demo project for info endpoint
info.build.artifact=${project.artifactId}
info.build.name=${project.name}
info.build.description=${project.description}
info.build.version=${project.version}

	Note
	In the above example we used `project.*` to set some values to be used as fallbacks if the Maven resource filtering has not been switched on for some reason.

32.3.1 Git commit information

Another useful feature of the info endpoint is its ability to publish information about the state of your git source code repository when the project was built. If a git.properties file is contained in your jar the git.branch and git.commit properties will be loaded.

For Maven users the spring-boot-starter-parent POM includes a pre-configured plugin to generate a git.properties file. Simply add the following declaration to your POM:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>pl.project13.maven</groupId>
            <artifactId>git-commit-id-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

A similar gradle-git plugin is also available for Gradle users, although a little more work is required to generate the properties file.

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