healthcheck

Healthcheck is a library for implementing Kubernetes liveness and readiness probe handlers in your Go application.

Features

• Integrates easily with Kubernetes. This library explicitly separates liveness vs. readiness checks instead of lumping everything into a single category of check.

• Optionally exposes each check as a Prometheus gauge metric. This allows for cluster-wide monitoring and alerting on individual checks.

• Supports asynchronous checks, which run in a background goroutine at a fixed interval. These are useful for expensive checks that you don't want to add latency to the liveness and readiness endpoints.

• Includes a small library of generically useful checks for validating upstream DNS, TCP, HTTP, and database dependencies as well as checking basic health of the Go runtime.

Usage

See the GoDoc examples for more detail.

• Install with go get or your favorite Go dependency manager: go get -u github.com/heptiolabs/healthcheck

• Import the package: import "github.com/heptiolabs/healthcheck/checks" & import "github.com/heptiolabs/healthcheck/handlers"

• Create a healthcheck.Handler:

  health := handlers.NewHandler(handlers.Options{})

You can also pass some metadata when creating a handler. Those metadata will be returned by the Endpoints

health := handlers.NewHandler(handlers.Options{
   Metadata: map[string]string{"foo": "bar"},
})

A great use case can be to pass the app-name, the app-version and the commit number in order to know which commit is making the app unhealthy

• Configure some application-specific liveness checks (whether the app itself is unhealthy):

  // Our app is not happy if we've got more than 100 goroutines running.
  health.AddLivenessCheck("goroutine-threshold", healthcheck.GoroutineCountCheck(100))

• Configure some application-specific readiness checks (whether the app is ready to serve requests):

  // Our app is not ready if we can't resolve our upstream dependency in DNS.
  health.AddReadinessCheck(
      "upstream-dep-dns",
      healthcheck.DNSResolveCheck("upstream.example.com", 50*time.Millisecond))
  
  // Our app is not ready if we can't connect to our database (`var db *sql.DB`) in <1s.
  health.AddReadinessCheck("database", healthcheck.DatabasePingCheck(db, 1*time.Second))

• Expose the /live and /ready endpoints over HTTP (on port 8086):

  go http.ListenAndServe("0.0.0.0:8086", health)

• Configure your Kubernetes container with HTTP liveness and readiness probes see the (Kubernetes documentation) for more detail:

  # this is a bare bones example
  # copy and paste livenessProbe and readinessProbe as appropriate for your app
  apiVersion: v1
  kind: Pod
  metadata:
    name: heptio-healthcheck-example
  spec:
    containers:
    - name: liveness
      image: your-registry/your-container
  
      # define a liveness probe that checks every 5 seconds, starting after 5 seconds
      livenessProbe:
        httpGet:
          path: /live
          port: 8086
        initialDelaySeconds: 5
        periodSeconds: 5
  
      # define a readiness probe that checks every 5 seconds
      readinessProbe:
        httpGet:
          path: /ready
          port: 8086
        periodSeconds: 5

• If one of your readiness checks fails, Kubernetes will stop routing traffic to that pod within a few seconds (depending on periodSeconds and other factors).

• If one of your liveness checks fails or your app becomes totally unresponsive, Kubernetes will restart your container.

HTTP Endpoints

Default routes

When you run go http.ListenAndServe("0.0.0.0:8086", health), two HTTP endpoints are exposed:

• /live: liveness endpoint (HTTP 200 if healthy, HTTP 503 if unhealthy)
• /ready: readiness endpoint (HTTP 200 if healthy, HTTP 503 if unhealthy)

Custom routes

You can also use other routes than /live & /ready by setting the HEALTH_LIVENESS_ROUTE and/or HEALTH_READINESS_ROUTE env var on your application

Endpoint response

Pass the ?full=1 query parameter to see the full check results as JSON. These are omitted by default for performance.

JSON result will look like this:

{
  "Checks": {
    "test-readiness-check": "failed readiness check",
    "redis-check":  "error message from check"
  },
  "Metadata": {
    "some fake metadata": "fake value",
    "app_name":  "fake service name"
  }
}