Question: Is there a built-in mechanism in Tomcat or Spring Boot which would expose information from which we could read number of requests for certain paths and the response time ?

Answer: 
You can use the [Spring Boot Actuator](http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-metrics.html) by including the following as a dependency:

```
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

```

It has a built-in [metrics](http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-metrics.html) endpoint that shows the number of calls to an endpoint and how long it took to answer last time (among other things).

It is also fully extendable, so you could use it to add your own metrics.
You can use JMX to monitor all kinds of things in Tomcat. Have a look at the [presentations](http://tomcat.apache.org/presentations.html) page on the Tomcat website. There is a set of presentation slides on there for "Monitoring Apache Tomcat with JMX" which includes a way to observe any arbitrary set of url-patterns.

No Spring required, but if you've got it already, you have that as another option.