Spring Metrics histogram
If you want to use the nice histograms from spring, it does not work out of the box. HistogramGauges. registerWithCommonFormat (timer , registry ) ; The actuator does activate a simple reporter, this seems to be the reporter that allows you to see all the meters over /actuator/metrics. This does not however include the nice quantile functionality of histograms, timers and distribution summaries. I expected to see these quantiles after using the above method, but no... For richer metric data it's thus better to use one of the third party solutions: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-metrics.html#production-ready-metrics-endpoint Prometheus is the only one of these solutions that just exposes the metrics over /actuator/ to scrape (as a .yml), the rest of the dependencies require a separate metric db to be presented to push the data to.