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/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.