health-check-endpoints

Implement liveness and readiness probes by exposing dedicated HTTP endpoints that perform lightweight checks on your microservices. This enables Kubernetes to verify application state and route traffic only to ready instances, triggering restarts or autoscaling decisions based on probe success or failure.

Shallow health checks like liveness and readiness verify the application process and traffic readiness, while deep health checks verify external dependencies such as databases, Redis, and external APIs to surface actionable dependency status.

Add dependency verification to your health endpoints by implementing probes that test database connectivity, Redis availability, external API responses, and disk or memory limits. This generates structured health reports including status, timestamps, and version context.

Yes, you can use these health check endpoints with load balancers and service discovery workflows. The endpoints provide progressive health visibility that load balancers query to determine routing and removal of unhealthy service instances.

A structured health check report for monitoring pipelines should include the service status, timestamps, and version or environment context. This data allows alerting workflows and monitoring pipelines to trigger automated responses based on deep dependency verification results.

Your readiness probe fails when external dependencies are down if the endpoint performs deep health checks. Deep checks verify database and Redis connectivity, causing the endpoint to return a failure status that prevents Kubernetes from routing traffic to the instance.