Deploying an application to production is only the beginning. You need to know whether your application is healthy and whether your database, cache, and message queue are reachable.
Without proper monitoring, you will only find out about issues when your users start complaining.
I have spent years building and maintaining high-load .NET systems, and health checks have always been my first line of defense. Today, I want to show you how to set up a production-ready monitoring system that gives you complete visibility into your application's health.
In this post, we will explore:
- Why health checks matter for production applications
- Adding health checks for Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, and RabbitMQ
- Building custom health checkers
- Building a custom JSON response formatter
- Implementing a custom health check publisher
- Setting up a professional Health Checks UI
Let's dive in.
Why Health Checks Matter
When you run an application in a modern environment like Kubernetes or Azure, the platform needs to know if your app is ready to handle traffic. This is where health checks come in.
A health check is a simple endpoint that returns the status of your application. If the database or message queue is down, the health check should report that the service is "Unhealthy".
Without health checks:
- Load balancers might send traffic to a broken instance.
- You won't know about database connection issues until users report errors.
- Background tasks might stop running without anyone noticing.
ASP.NET Core provides a built-in framework for health checks. It allows you to check everything from database connections to external APIs and system resources.
👉 Read the full article on my newsletter: https://antondevtips.com/blog/how-to-set-up-production-ready-monitoring-with-aspnetcore-health-checks
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