How to Add Spring Boot Actuator /health Endpoint to Legacy Spring Apps

Add Required Dependencies

Legacy Spring projects cannot use Spring Boot starter POMs directly, so you must copy the necessary spring-boot-starter-actuator dependency into your pom.xml manually:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>

Manual Configuration

Because a traditional Spring application lacks Spring Boot’s auto‑configuration, you need to create a configuration class that imports the Actuator’s core auto‑configuration classes and registers the required beans.

@Import({
    EndpointAutoConfiguration.class, // basic Actuator infrastructure
    HealthIndicatorAutoConfiguration.class // /health endpoint support
})
@Configuration
public class ActuatorConfig {
    @Bean
    public EndpointHandlerMapping endpointHandlerMapping() {
        // loads all Actuator endpoints
        return new EndpointHandlerMapping();
    }

    @Bean
    public HealthMvcEndpoint healthMvcEndpoint() {
        // implementation of the /health endpoint
        return new HealthMvcEndpoint();
    }
}

After adding this configuration, start the application and you will see the /health endpoint printed in the console. Access it via a browser or HTTP client to obtain the current health status of the instance.

Create Additional Endpoints (e.g., /metrics)

If you also want to expose other Actuator endpoints such as /metrics, import the PublicMetricsAutoConfiguration class and define a bean that implements the metrics endpoint.

@Import(PublicMetricsAutoConfiguration.class)
@Configuration
public class MetricsConfig {
    @Bean
    public MetricsMvcEndpoint metricsMvcEndpoint() {
        return new MetricsMvcEndpoint();
    }
}

With these steps completed, the legacy Spring application now provides the same monitoring capabilities as a Spring Boot service, allowing Spring Cloud components (Eureka, Consul, etc.) to perform health checks and collect metrics.