Section 07 · Monitoring & Health

Health Endpoints

Health check endpoints for monitoring, load balancing, and infrastructure observability

2 items 2 critical

This guide walks you through auditing a project's health check endpoints for monitoring, load balancing, and infrastructure observability.

The Goal: Observable Infrastructure

Load balancers, orchestrators, and operators can see exactly what is healthy and what is not, at a glance.

  • Discoverable — basic health at a standard path (/health), no authentication required
  • Fast — basic health responds instantly without checking external dependencies
  • Comprehensive — deep health verifies all external services (database, cache, queues, APIs)
  • Protected — deep health requires authentication to prevent infrastructure exposure
  • Diagnostic — returns 503 with specific details when dependencies fail

Before You Start

  1. Confirm you're in the target repository's root directory
  2. Have the app running locally (or know how to start it)
  3. Know what external services the app depends on (database, Redis, external APIs, etc.)

basic-health

HEALTH-001
Basic health endpoint exists critical

Simple health endpoint at standard path (/health, /healthz, /ping) returning 200 OK with no auth required and <50ms response time

“How does your load balancer know the app is actually alive?”

deep-health

HEALTH-002
Deep health endpoint with dependency checks critical

Auth-protected endpoint that checks all external service connectivity (database, cache, APIs) and returns 503 with details when any is unavailable

“DB is down — are you getting a 200 OK or the truth?”
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