Implementing ASP.NET Core health checks

ASP.NET Core has a built-in health check middleware that allows us to natively implement very robust health checks. This middleware is not limited to API projects, and it comes in handy to help us to monitor the health of our application. Both readiness and liveness health checks can be created natively, and there is support for a UI dashboard. Using the liveness health check, which is relatively simple to implement, we can implement a simple API endpoint that returns a simple response, as expected. We can also check on the health of the dependencies of the app using a more comprehensive readiness health check.

For this example, we will be adding liveness and readiness health checks to our appointment booking service. This service has several dependencies and is integral to several operations in our application. We need to ensure that it is always healthy and react quickly if it degrades.

Let us start off by exploring how we can outfit...