Importance of health checks
A health check, as the name suggests, allows us to track and report on the health of a service. Each service is a potential point of failure in an application, and each service has dependencies that can influence its health. We need a mechanism that allows us to probe the overall status of our services to be more proactive in solving issues.
ASP.NET Core has a built-in mechanism for reporting on the health of a service, and it can very simply tell us if the service is healthy, degraded, or unhealthy. We can extend this functionality to report the health of not only the service but to also account for the health of the connections to dependent services such as databases and caches.
We can also establish various endpoints that can be used to check different outcomes, such as general runtime versus startup health. This categorization comes in handy when we want to categorize monitoring operations based on the tools we are using, monitoring teams in place...
