Spring Boot is an excellent tool to bootstrap java application. Most of the references mention how to create a standalone java application, optionally with embedded web server (tomcat or jetty). But Spring Boot supports also creating web applications intended to run within servlet container.
Very often there is a need to monitor the Java application server. For example, external monitoring tool, like Nagious/Zenoss/Zabbix needs to get some metrics, like heap memory usage or thread count.
Usual way to get that metrics is to setup access to application server via JMX.
But, sometimes, it is not possible to leave some other port opened for JMX and the only port available is HTTP(80 or 8080) or HTTPS(443 or 8443).
Here the Jolokia comes to rescue!
Deploying to Apache Tomcat often requires making changes to default configuration. These changes are often environment specific. Also, when upgrading a Tomcat to new version you need to be sure that all your custom changes have not been lost and were applied to new configuration. To deal with all that stuff Tomcat via separation of the configuration. This post contains step-by-step instruction will help you to establish custom tomcat configuration.