Health checks and microservices
A health check allows us to monitor the health of our services. Frankly, another service or resource that exposes an HTTP endpoint becomes a capable candidate for health checks. We can simply make a request to this endpoint and hope for a response that indicates a successful response. The simplest form of a health check can come from implementing a simple GET request, which returns a 200OK HTTP response. We can add further intelligence to such an endpoint, check connectivity to other key services, and use those to influence the response code returned.
Health checks are useful mechanisms for both monolithic and microservices applications. In the context of microservices, however, we have an increased challenge of monitoring and maintaining several services. Even more so if they are configured to scale on individual levels. Health checks can be used to monitor the health and uptime of interdependent services and carry out some form of corrective action...
