Accessing Additional Actuator Endpoints

Enabling other endpoints

Until now, we’ve only seen the default actuator endpoints, health and info, exposed to the web. Spring Boot actually has many other endpoints, but they’re disabled from web access by default.

Actuator endpoints offered by Java Management Extensions (JMX) are enabled by default, while their web-based counterparts are disabled by default. This is primarily for security reasons. JMX, in its default configuration, requires us to run JConsole on the same machine. Web access to actuator endpoints is the complete opposite. While convenient, it becomes super easy to expose all our application has to offer. This is why Spring Boot 2.3 disables web access to actuator endpoints. The only exception is a shallow health check (only reporting UP) and info data (information we must choose to include).

So, we could include everything if we really wanted to. All it takes is a single line in application.properties: