Summary

Health checks are simple yet powerful constructs that aid us in ensuring that our applications are running at maximum efficiency. We see where it is important for us to not only monitor and report on the uptime of the service but also the dependencies, such as the database and other services that may be needed for the application to operate properly.

Using ASP.NET Core, we have access to a built-in health check mechanism that can be customized and extended to implement specific checks and associate them with different endpoints. This is especially useful when we need to separate the types of tests that are conducted relative to the endpoint being called.

We have also explored how orchestrators can be configured to poll our health check endpoints. Orchestrators make monitoring and responding to failures easier since they will handle the routing of traffic to healthy instances and restart instances as needed.

Health checks help us not only monitor the target web service...