MicroProfile Health is an API designed specifically for use in cloud and containerized environments, where you want to quickly determine if an instance of an application is unhealthy and restart it. How exactly do you use it though? In this session, I’ll run through how to add some health checks to your application, and how to configure a number of cloud providers and containers to effectively use them to restart your application instances.

This is an updated blog of the original which was published in May 2016

Payara Server provides the Health Check Service for automatic self-monitoring in order to detect future problems as soon as possible. When enabled, the Health Check Service periodically checks some low level metrics. Whenever it detects that a threshold is not met, it triggers alert notifications that allow to detect undesired behavior and predict possible failures. All of these automatic checks are very lightweight and run with a negligible impact on performance.

There has been a lot of noise around MicroProfile for quite a while now, and one of the specs provided by MicroProfile are Health Checks. The aim of this spec is to allow you to write a number of health checks that will run when you hit a specific endpoint, the intention being that this endpoint can be periodically poked by a container orchestrator to determine if an instance is responsive and healthy.

We recently held a webinar hosted by myself, Arjan Tijms and Ondrej Mihalyi based on exploring and demonstrating the latest features and updates in the 184 release. This included:

Did You Know?

Since being introduced in the 163 release, the Request Tracing Service has allowed you to see which requests are taking a long time. However, this service will only tell you about requests once they have completed. If a thread is stuck and unable to complete you will not know about it. To resolve that problem, we added the Stuck Threads HealthCheck to Payara Server, which checks for requests that have not finished and outputs their stack trace.

In the fourth part of our continuing series on alternatives for commercial Oracle GlassFish features we are looking at the JMX Monitoring Service & the Payara HealthCheck Service as possible replacements for Oracle's Monitoring Scripting Client.