1. Enabling Production-ready Features

The spring-boot-actuator module provides all of Spring Boot’s production-ready features. The simplest way to enable the features is to add a dependency to the spring-boot-starter-actuator ‘Starter’.

Definition of Actuator

An actuator is a manufacturing term that refers to a mechanical device for moving or controlling something. Actuators can generate a large amount of motion from a small change.

To add the actuator to a Maven based project, add the following ‘Starter’ dependency:

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

For Gradle, use the following declaration:

dependencies {
    compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-actuator")
}