There are a lot of frameworks that provide tools for application development. But Spring Boot doesn't only provide application development-specific features; it also provides a post-production grade feature. This allows you to monitor your Spring application during production using HTTP endpoints or with JMX.

Spring Boot Actuator is the final key component of its building blocks. Other parts of Spring Boot's building blocks simplify Spring development; the Actuator instead offers the ability to inspect the internals of your application at runtime. The Actuator provides data on auditing, metrics, and the health of your Spring Boot application using HTTP endpoints or with JMX. It helps to you manage your application when it's pushed to production.

The Actuator installed in a Spring Boot application provides the following benefits:

• It provides details of all beans configured in the Spring application context
• Actuator also provides details about Spring Boot's auto-configuration
• It also ensures all environment variables, system properties, configuration properties, and command-line arguments are available to your application
• The Actuator gives various metrics pertaining to memory usage, garbage collection, web requests, and data source usage
• It provides a trace of recent HTTP requests handled by your application
• It also gives information about the current state of the threads in the Spring Boot application

Spring Boot Actuator provides the listed information in two ways:

• You could use web endpoints
• Or you could use it via a shell interface

We'll explore Spring Boot Actuator's capabilities in detail when we get to Chapter 3, Getting Started with Spring CLI and Actuator.

We have seen all the building blocks of Spring Boot. These blocks serve to simplify Spring application development in its own way.

Now, let's move to the next section of this chapter, and see how to set up a Spring Boot workspace to develop your first Spring Boot application.