We’ve all been there: something goes wrong in production, and the logs don’t tell the whole story. In this talk, we’ll go beyond basic health checks and dive into how Spring Boot Actuator and Micrometer can help you build applications that are not just functional, but also transparent, diagnosable, and production-ready.

Through practical examples, we’ll show how to enable and customize Actuator endpoints to gain real-time insights into your application's state. We’ll also demonstrate how to collect metrics using Micrometer and export them to Prometheus. Visualizing metrics and setting up alerts in Grafana will also be covered.

Another focus of the session is integrating OpenTelemetry to enable distributed tracing across multiple services. To wrap up, we’ll share best practices for systematically and sustainably embedding observability into your development process.

Whether you're working locally or running in Kubernetes – this session will show you how to meaningfully improve the observability of your Spring Boot application without getting lost in technical complexity.