Health Checks
Health checks are a monitoring technique used in software systems to verify the operational status and readiness of components, such as applications, services, or infrastructure. They typically involve periodic requests (e.g., HTTP endpoints) that return status codes or metrics indicating if a component is healthy, degraded, or unhealthy. This enables automated detection of failures, load balancing decisions, and self-healing mechanisms in distributed systems.
Developers should implement health checks to ensure system reliability, especially in microservices, cloud-native, and containerized environments where components are ephemeral and distributed. They are critical for use cases like Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes, load balancer traffic routing, and automated recovery in DevOps pipelines, helping prevent downtime and improve fault tolerance.