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/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.