Application Startup tracking

During the application startup, the SpringApplication and the ApplicationContext perform many tasks related to the application lifecycle, the beans lifecycle or even processing application events. With ApplicationStartup, Spring Framework allows you to track the application startup sequence with StartupStep objects. This data can be collected for profiling purposes, or just to have a better understanding of an application startup process.

You can choose an ApplicationStartup implementation when setting up the SpringApplication instance. For example, to use the BufferingApplicationStartup, you could write:

Java
Kotlin

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.context.metrics.buffering.BufferingApplicationStartup;

@SpringBootApplication
public class MyApplication {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication application = new SpringApplication(MyApplication.class);
		application.setApplicationStartup(new BufferingApplicationStartup(2048));
		application.run(args);
	}

}

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication
import org.springframework.boot.context.metrics.buffering.BufferingApplicationStartup
import org.springframework.boot.runApplication

@SpringBootApplication
class MyApplication

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
	runApplication<MyApplication>(*args) {
		applicationStartup = BufferingApplicationStartup(2048)
	}
}

The first available implementation, FlightRecorderApplicationStartup is provided by Spring Framework. It adds Spring-specific startup events to a Java Flight Recorder session and is meant for profiling applications and correlating their Spring context lifecycle with JVM events (such as allocations, GCs, class loading…). Once configured, you can record data by running the application with the Flight Recorder enabled:

$ java -XX:StartFlightRecording:filename=recording.jfr,duration=10s -jar demo.jar

Spring Boot ships with the BufferingApplicationStartup variant; this implementation is meant for buffering the startup steps and draining them into an external metrics system. Applications can ask for the bean of type BufferingApplicationStartup in any component.

Spring Boot can also be configured to expose a startup endpoint that provides this information as a JSON document.