Spring Boot: Up and Running

Chapter 5. Configuring and Inspecting Your Spring Boot App

There are many things that can go wrong with any application, and some of these many things may even have simple solutions. With the rare exception of an occasional good guess, however, one must determine the root cause of a problem before it is possible to truly solve it.

Debugging Java or Kotlin applications—or any other applications, for that matter—is a fundamental skill that every developer should learn very early on in their career and refine and expand throughout. I don’t find that to be the case universally, so if you haven’t already become handy with the debugging capabilities of your language and tools of choice, please explore the options at your disposal as soon as possible. It really is important in everything you develop and can save you inordinate amounts of time.

That said, debugging code is only one level of establishing, identifying, and isolating behaviors manifested within your application. As applications become more dynamic and distributed, developers often need to do the following:

• Configure and reconfigure applications dynamically

• Determine/confirm current settings and their origins

• Inspect and monitor application environment and health indicators

• Temporarily adjust logging levels of live apps to identify root causes

This chapter demonstrates how to use Spring Boot’s built-in configuration capabilities, its Autoconfiguration Report, and Spring Boot Actuator to create, identify, and modify ...