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What is Health Check?

An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.

Health checks enable load balancers and orchestrators to detect unhealthy instances. Liveness probes check if the application is running (restart if not). Readiness probes check if it can handle traffic (remove from load balancer if not).

A health endpoint (/health or /healthz) typically checks database connectivity, disk space, memory usage, and dependent service availability. Kubernetes supports HTTP, TCP, and command-based health checks with configurable intervals and thresholds.

Related Terms

Canary Deployment
A deployment strategy that gradually rolls out changes to a small subset of users before deploying to the entire infrastructure.
Infrastructure Drift
The divergence between the actual state of infrastructure and its defined desired state, caused by manual changes or untracked modifications.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment โ€” automated practices for building, testing, and deploying code changes.
API Gateway
A server that acts as the single entry point for API requests, handling routing, authentication, rate limiting, and monitoring.
Kubernetes Secret
A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data like passwords, tokens, and certificates, with base64 encoding and optional encryption at rest.
Observability
The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs through metrics, logs, and traces.
View All DevOps Terms โ†’