Actuator is a Spring Boot module (`spring-boot-starter-actuator`) that adds production-ready operational endpoints to an application — health checks, metrics, environment details, thread dumps, and more — exposed over HTTP (and/or JMX), giving ops teams and monitoring tools visibility into a running application's internal state without needing custom instrumentation code.

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#Actuator

Most Actuator Endpoints Are Disabled by Default Except Health

Out of the box, only `/actuator/health` is exposed over HTTP — the rest (env, metrics, beans, threaddump, etc.) require explicit opt-in via `management.endpoints.web.exposure.include`, precisely because many of them reveal sensitive internal details (environment variables, full bean graphs) that shouldn't be publicly accessible by default in a fresh application.

spring-boot-starter-actuator → /actuator/health, /actuator/metrics, /actuator/env, and more — built-in operational visibility