healthcheck

healthcheck is a package that supplies an http.Handler that reports whether your service is healthy or not. All you have to do is define a function that returns an error if one of your service’s dependencies is unhealthy.

Using the package

Defining a check

To use the package, first we need to know if our service is healthy or not. A service is healthy if all the checks for it return no error. Let’s define a new check:

type SQL struct {
	DB *sql.DB
	ID string
}

func (s SQL) Check(ctx context.Context) error {
	return s.DB.Ping()
}

func (s SQL) LogInfo(ctx context.Context) string {
	return s.ID
}

This check fulfills the healthcheck.Checker interface, by defining the Check method and the LogInfo method. The Check method returns nil if the check should be considered successful, or an error if it should be marked unhealthy. The LogInfo method returns information about the instance of the check (a database host, a connection string, or what have you) to uniquely identify the check in logs.

You can use the SQL check defined above by calling NewSQL from this package.

Setting up the http.Handler

Now that we have a check, we want an http.Handler that will return a 500 status code if the check fails, so we know something is wrong and our monitoring can alert.

For that, we use the NewChecks function:

// db is set up as an *sql.DB connection
sqlCheck := SQL{DB: db, ID: "mydb"}
handler := NewChecks(context.Background(), nil, sqlCheck)

handler is now an http.Handler, and will return a 500 status code if sqlCheck returns an error. You can set up as many checks on the handler as you like:

// db is set up as an *sql.DB connection
// otherdb is set up as a separate connection
sqlCheck := SQL{DB: db, ID: "mydb"}
otherCheck := SQL{DB: otherdb, ID: "myotherdb"}
handler := NewChecks(context.Background(), nil, sqlCheck, otherCheck)

Of course, it’s not super useful to know that your service is unhealthy, but not know what the error was. To get that info, we need to pass a logging function. A logging function is anything that fills the func(message string, ...args interface{}) signature. You’ll notice that log.Printf fits the bill. Let’s use that.

// db is set up as an *sql.DB connection
// otherdb is set up as a separate connection
sqlCheck := SQL{DB: db, ID: "mydb"}
otherCheck := SQL{DB: otherdb, ID: "myotherdb"}
handler := NewChecks(context.Background(), log.Printf, sqlCheck, otherCheck)

Now the error that was returned that caused the 500 will be logged.