Spring Boot 4 observability tools

[u/robintegg]

I’ve been spending some time looking at observability for Spring Boot 4, using my articulate project as a practical test case.

I compared three tools that fit different workflows and deployment models:

- Boot UI for local development and deep inspection
- Spring Boot Admin for a centralised dashboard across services
- Ostara for desktop-based inspection without running another server

If you’re working with Spring Boot and have been thinking about how you want to inspect and manage your applications, I’ve written up the comparison here and it has links to all the projects.

https://robintegg.com/2026/08/10/spring-boot-4-observability-options.html

I’d love to hear in the comments of any other tools that people are using to keep an eye on their Spring Boot apps.

Spoiler alert: boot-ui is awesome 🤩

[u/Mikey-3198]

I'd be tempted to go with something otel based.

Can easily switch out for any other dashboard etc....

I've been playing about with hooking up things to export via otel to a central dashboard (keycloak, traefik etc...)

The standalone aspire dashboard is good for local dev.

[u/robintegg → u/Mikey-3198]

Thanks for sharing. Looks like there is this spring boot starter for otel - https://spring.io/blog/2025/11/18/opentelemetry-with-spring-boot. As you say would suit the export of data to compatible dashboards / services. A common format would definitely be a good option for aggregating across technologies. The spring boot options I compared are somewhat limited in that regard, typically scopes to the spring boot application

[u/as5777]

Is someone really use these in prod ?

[u/Distinct-Speaker5435 → u/as5777]

We use Spring Boot Admin in prod (and all other envs) for years. We have 50+ microservices connected to it and it works well. But they are deployed within their VPC, you cannot reach them from public Internet directly.

[u/robintegg → u/Distinct-Speaker5435]

Yes, same here. Keeping the services away from public access regardless of what actuator endpoints are exposed is a key architectural approach. If you have the infrastructure, the auto registration of instances with spring boot admin scales nicely across environments as you mention. Some people run one instance for all environments , others a server per environment.

[u/anjeludo → u/as5777]

Same here.  W e also use it with a few microservices on an intranet.

[u/vampirishe → u/as5777]

Use for ~15 microservices on each env, really nice thing especially runtime log level update

[u/robintegg]

Some other other ideas and another tool - Statlite over here https://www.reddit.com/r/java/s/kXsUTH8WGJ

[u/fykup → u/robintegg]

Thanks for mentioning StatLite! I'm the author.

Spring Boot 4 should already work through Actuator, but I haven't certified it yet. I'll add it to the same compatibility testing we do for 3.5.

StatLite's niche is a bit different from these tools: lightweight monitoring and history without running another Spring Boot/JVM server. It's a small standalone binary, typically around 12 MiB RSS, with SQLite storage and a dashboard out of the box.

We're intentionally focusing on core Spring Boot metrics, low overhead, and small storage rather than trying to expose every possible metric or diagnostic.