Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot

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Introduction

Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot attacks your running Spring Boot application to test resilience. Add it as a dependency, activate the chaos-monkey profile, and configure which components to target.

Watchers select beans such as controllers, services, repositories and REST clients, and assaults inject latency, throw exceptions or kill the application. Runtime assaults affect the whole app, for example filling memory or stressing CPU. Settings can be changed at runtime through Spring Boot Actuator endpoints.

In the quality loop it tests timeouts, retries and circuit breakers inside Java services, often in staging.

The source code is at codecentric/chaos-monkey-spring-boot on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 945 stars; the most recent commit was on 30 October 2026.

Features

1. Watchers: Target controllers, services, repositories and clients.
2. Latency assaults: Add random delays.
3. Exception assaults: Throw configured exceptions.
4. Kill assaults: Stop the app.
5. Memory and CPU assaults: Runtime resource pressure.
6. Actuator control: Change settings at runtime.

Pros

1. Application-level: Tests resilience code paths directly.
2. Free to use: Open source under the Apache-2.0 licence, so the core tool costs nothing to use.
3. Actively maintained: The repository had commits as recent as 30 October 2026.

Cons

1. Spring Boot only: Java Spring apps only.
2. In-process: Runs inside the service you test.
3. Production caution: Needs strict controls if used live.

Usage and Links (Example)

spring.profiles.active=chaos-monkey
chaos.monkey.enabled=true
chaos.monkey.watcher.service=true
chaos.monkey.assaults.latency-active=true
chaos.monkey.assaults.latency-range-start=500
chaos.monkey.assaults.latency-range-end=2000

Resources:

• Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot website
• GitHub repository

Pricing

Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Recommended for?

1. Spring Boot teams testing resilience patterns.

Conclusion

This library is the quickest way to inject faults into Spring Boot services.

Use it to verify timeouts and circuit breakers before production.

On CheckOps, Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot is filed under the Integration testing and Production monitoring & observability stages. Related tools listed here include Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos, Chaos Toolkit, Gremlin, Steadybit and Toxiproxy. Before standardising on one, compare recent maintenance activity, the pricing model as your usage grows, and the integrations you rely on today. Information on this page was verified against the official website, documentation and repository on 11 November 2026.