Health Checking & Readiness Probes
Use the standard gRPC health checking protocol so load balancers and orchestrators know when a service is ready to serve traffic.
Why Health Checks Matter
An orchestrator must know whether a service instance can handle requests. Sending traffic to a starting, overloaded, or broken instance causes errors.
The gRPC health checking protocol answers: is this service healthy?
The Standard Health Service
gRPC defines grpc.health.v1.Health with two methods:
Check— a one-shot status queryWatch— a stream of status updates
Status is SERVING, NOT_SERVING, or UNKNOWN.
All lessons in this course
- Logging gRPC Interactions
- Tracing with OpenTelemetry
- Monitoring gRPC Metrics
- Health Checking & Readiness Probes