Implement comprehensive health check endpoints for liveness, readiness, and dependency monitoring. Use when deploying to Kubernetes, implementing load balancer health checks, or monitoring service availability.

Health Check Endpoints Table of Contents [Overview]( overview) [When to Use]( when to use) [Quick Start]( quick start) [Reference Guides]( reference guides) [Best Practices]( best practices) Overview Implement health check endpoints to monitor service health, dependencies, and readiness for traffic. When to Use Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes Load balancer health checks Service discovery and registration Monitoring and alerting systems Circuit breaker decisions Auto scaling triggers Deployment verification Quick Start Minimal working example: Reference Guides Detailed implementations in the references/ directory: Guide Contents [Express.js Health Checks](references/expressjs health checks.md) Express.js Health Checks [Spring Boot Actuator Style (Java)](references/spring boot actuator style java.md) Spring Boot Actuator Style (Java) [Python Flask Health Checks](references/python flask health checks.md) Python Flask Health Checks Best Practices ✅ DO Implement separate liveness and readiness probes Keep liveness probes lightweight Check critical dependencies in readiness Return appropriate HTTP status codes Include response time metrics Set reasonable timeouts Cache health check results briefly Include version and environment info Monitor health check failures ❌ DON'T Make liveness probes check dependencies Return 200 for failed health checks Take too long to respond Skip important dependency checks Expose sensitive information Ignore health check failures

health-check-endpoints