Overview

Health checks are extremely important in determining the status of an application - in this instance, the Tyk Gateway. Without them, it can be hard to know the actual state of the Gateway.

Depending on your configuration, the Gateway could be using a few components:

• The Tyk Dashboard.
• RPC
• Redis (compulsory).

Any of these components could go down at any given point and it’d be great to understand if the Gateway is currently usable or not. A good usage of the health check endpoint is for the configuration of a load balancer to multiple instances of the Gateway or as a Kubernetes liveness probe.

Health check is implemented as per the Health Check Response Format for HTTP APIs RFC

An example of the response from this API is as follows:

{
  "status": "pass",
  "version": "v2.9.3",
  "description": "Tyk GW",
  "details": {
    "redis": {
      "status": "pass",
      "componentType": "datastore",
      "time": "2020-05-19T03:42:55+01:00"
    }
  }
}

Configure health check

By default, the liveness health check is going to run on the /hello path. But it can be updated to any value by:

health_check_endpoint_name: "status"

This will make the health check available on /status instead