Observing Spring

As applications grow and become more complex, it's increasingly important to see what's going on inside. In this session, you'll learn how to put Micrometer and Spring's Actuator to work, enabling you to see, monitor, and take action on the internal activities of your Spring applications.

Historically, we've relied on application logs to understand what an application is doing, to measure its performance, and troubleshoot issues. Although logs can provide valuable insight, it only helps you see what happened in the past, not what's happening right now. And typically the most helpful log entries (those at DEBUG level) are disabled in a production application.

Modern application observability involves tracking key metrics and tracing the flow of an application, even across service boundaries. Spring Boot 3 introduced some powerful metrics and tracing capabilities based on Micrometer to open a window into your application's inner-workings.

About Craig Walls

Craig Walls is a Principal Engineer, Java Champion, Alexa Champion, and the author of Spring AI in Action, Spring in Action, and Build Talking Apps. He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring. When he's not slinging code, Craig is planning his next trip to Disney World or Disneyland and spending as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 1 bird and 2 dogs.

More About Craig »