Spring Boot Actuator is a sub-project of Spring Boot that brings a lot of production-ready features to the Spring Boot application. This includes service info, health checks, metrics gathering, tracing traffic, state of the database, and so on. The central idea behind a Spring Boot actuator is to provide the application's essential metrics and make it possible to extend them with ease.

A Spring Boot actuator exposes HTTP endpoints and JMX beans with a lot of operational information, and this allows seamless integration with a lot of monitoring software. Its numerous plugins extend those capabilities even more. As with most of Spring's modules, it is enough to add one dependency to get a consistent tool set for application monitoring.