I am not a doctor, I am a Software Engineer and this is a tech post! You can continue to read!

To monitor monolithic what we usually do is install a tool like Nagios to centralize all our metrics and to stay in touch with our infrastructure and our application. In a distributed system with more that one services with own metrics the situation is totally different. This about how it’s more dynamic respect a monolithic. Containers or VM that scale up and down and that move around the network, Nagios is a good solution to check if our new service after a deploy is safe and ready to be attached into the production pool? I love a talk made by Kelsey Hightower during the Monitorama event, he speak about healthcheck watch him to follow a great demo!

Healthcheck is an API that your service exposes to share it’s status, if you make it really start it’s a good tool to understand the situation of your service with just a call. A service could be ready or not and it’s in the best situation to communicate its status. It’s a like a patient, you need to ask him all what you need to make the best diagnosis and take a decision about it.

We can stay focused on a REST service, it exposes an API under the route /health. The response could has two different Status Code:

200 if all it’s good and you service is ready

500 it there is something wrong and your service is not ready

To make an smart HealthCheck what do we need to check?

This is a real implementation:

<?php echo 1 ;

It’s better that nothing but we are looking for something smart! We need to check all dependendencies that our service has and it’s for this reason that the service itself is the best actor because it knows what it need to be ready. I wrote a demo service, the name is micro, it’s in go and the version 2 use mysql.

func Health ( username string , password string , addr string ) func ( http . ResponseWriter , * http . Request ) { return func ( w http . ResponseWriter , r * http . Request ) { res := healtResponse { Status : true } httpStatus := 200 dsn := fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%s@tcp(%s:3306)/micro" , username , password , addr ) ddb , err := sql . Open ( "mysql" , dsn ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } if err := ddb . Ping (); err != nil { res . Status = false res . Info = map [ string ] string { "database" : err . Error ()} } c , _ := json . Marshal ( res ) if res . Status == false { httpStatus = 500 } log . Println ( "%s called /health" , r . Host ) w . WriteHeader ( httpStatus ) w . Header () . Set ( "Content-Type" , "application/json" ) w . Write ( c ) } }

Doesn’t matter how many dependencies you service has, you need to check all of them, databases, other services that it uses. In my case I decided to add a key-value field, I called it info , it contains some information about whether mysql is or is not not working, in order to make the debug flow easy. If the service that you are checking has an healthcheck you are lucky! You can use that entrypoint to know if your dependency is fine. If you are not so lucky if you can create a wrapper or just check if you can reach the service, in my case I just tried to connect to mysql in order to know if my network supports me! I also using the correct database name in order to avoid edge case like “mysql is on but the database doesn’t exist”.

The ecosystem supports healthchecks! Nginx looks it to know if a server is reachable, if the health check doesn’t work for a while it just make the server out for few times. Same for Kubernetes, Swarm and Docker. Docker provides a library in go an healthcheck framework that you can use in your applications, it is also used in Docker 1.12.

You can describe in your Dockerfile an HealthCheck

HEALTHCHECK CMD ./cli health

If the exit code is 0 Docker marks you container like healthy if it’s different like unhealthy. Very easy and flexible, you can check your REST healthcheck in this way

HEALTHCHECK --interval=30s --timeout=30s --retries=3 \ CMD curl -si localhost:8000/health | grep 'HTTP/1.1 200 OK' > /dev/null

--interval is the timing between two healthcheck, --timeout is used to mark like unhealthy a service that doesn’t come back after 30s in this case, --retries is the attempts to do before make a container unhealthy.

HealtCheck doesn’t replace traditional monitoring system but with a lot of instances and services has a single point to check and understand the situation after a deploy make your like easy and your products stable.