We need to document what is needed to get a Spring Boot 1.5.x application to expose Prometheus metrics.

The basic principles are:

• Add actuator to the dependencies of the project: org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-actuator
• Add Micrometer's support for Spring Boot 1.5.x by adding the following dependency: io.micrometer:micrometer-spring-legacy
• Make Micrometer export metrics in Prometheus format by adding the following dependency: io.micrometer:micrometer-registry-prometheus
• When the application starts, the Prometheus metrics are available at: /prometheus. This can be changed by setting the endpoints.prometheus.id property to whatever path is needed

A simple example of how to use Spring Boot and Prometheus on Docker, can be found here.

The reference documentation for Micrometer and Spring Boot 1.5.x is here