Monitoring Health

Why to Monitor Health?

The go-demo-2 Docker image is designed to fail on the first sign of trouble. In cases like that, there is no need for any health checks. When things go wrong:

• The main process stops.
• The container hosting the main process stops as well.
• Kubernetes restarts the failed container.

However, not all services are designed to fail fast. Even those that are might still benefit from additional health checks. For example, a back-end API can be up and running but, due to a memory leak, serves requests much slower than expected. Such a situation might benefit from a health check that would verify whether the service responds within, for example, two seconds.

Kubernetes Probes

We can exploit Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes for that.

Liveness