Upstream Health Checks

As part of configuring an Upstream, Gloo Gateway provides the option of adding health checks that periodically assess the readiness of the Upstream to receive requests. See the Envoy documentation for more information.

Upstreams with working health checks will not be removed from Envoy’s service directory, even due to configuration changes. To allow them to be removed, set ignoreHealthOnHostRemoval in the Upstream’s configuration.

Configuration

Descriptions of the options available for configuring health checks can be found here .

Custom paths for HttpHealthChecks

There is a way to add custom paths to health check requests shown in the example below.

spec:
  healthChecks:
  - healthyThreshold: 1
    httpHealthCheck:
      path: /check/healthz
    interval: 30s
    timeout: 10s
    unhealthyThreshold: 1

A path represents an explicitly-specified path to check the health of the upstream. The timeout declares how much time between checks there should be. An unhealthyThreshold is the limit of checks that are allowed to fail before declaring the upstream unhealthy. A healthyThreshold is the limit of checks that are allowed to pass before declaring an upstream healthy. The interval is the interval of time that you send healthchecks as to not overload your upstream service.