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Health Checks

Health checks are a way to ensure that your applications and services are running correctly. They allow the platform to monitor the health of your resources and ensure that traffic is only routed to healthy instances. This is important for Rolling Updates to work correctly.

Traefik​

When using Traefik as the reverse proxy, health checks are an integral part of how it routes traffic.

Enabled​

If your resource has health checks enabled, Traefik will only route traffic to it if the health check passes. If it fails, Traefik will not route traffic to the resource, causing a 404 Not Found or No available server error.

Disabled​

If your resource has health checks disabled, Traefik will route traffic to it regardless of the health check status.

Configure Health Checks​

Applications​

There are two ways to configure health checks:

  1. Using the UI: Set up health checks directly in the dashboard when creating or editing an application. Specify the path, expected response code, and check interval. The container must have either curl or wget installed.

  2. Using the Dockerfile: Define health checks in your Dockerfile using the HEALTHCHECK instruction.

If health checks are defined in both the UI and the Dockerfile, the Dockerfile takes precedence.

Service Stacks​

Services using Docker Compose require health checks defined in the Dockerfile or in the docker-compose.yml file using the healthcheck attribute.

When to use health checks?

It is recommended to enable health checks for all your resources to ensure only healthy resources receive traffic. If you cannot set up health checks, you can disable them — but be aware that unhealthy resources will still receive traffic.