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Health Check

Notes:

  • Liveness and readiness probes were introduced in GitLab 9.1.
  • The health_check endpoint was introduced in GitLab 8.8 and will be deprecated in GitLab 9.1. Read more in the old behavior section.

GitLab provides liveness and readiness probes to indicate service health and reachability to required services. These probes report on the status of the database connection, Redis connection, and access to the filesystem. These endpoints can be provided to schedulers like Kubernetes to hold traffic until the system is ready or restart the container as needed.

Access Token

An access token needs to be provided while accessing the probe endpoints. The current accepted token can be found under the Admin area ➔ Monitoring ➔ Health check (admin/health_check) page of your GitLab instance.

access token

The access token can be passed as a URL parameter:

https://gitlab.example.com/-/readiness?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

which will then provide a report of system health in JSON format:

{
  "db_check": {
    "status": "ok"
  },
  "redis_check": {
    "status": "ok"
  },
  "fs_shards_check": {
    "status": "ok",
    "labels": {
      "shard": "default"
    }
  }
}

Using the Endpoint

Once you have the access token, the probes can be accessed:

  • https://gitlab.example.com/-/readiness?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/-/liveness?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

Status

On failure, the endpoint will return a 500 HTTP status code. On success, the endpoint will return a valid successful HTTP status code, and a success message.

Old behavior

Notes:

  • Liveness and readiness probes were introduced in GitLab 9.1.
  • The health_check endpoint was introduced in GitLab 8.8 and will be deprecated in GitLab 9.1. Read more in the old behavior section.

GitLab provides a health check endpoint for uptime monitoring on the health_check web endpoint. The health check reports on the overall system status based on the status of the database connection, the state of the database migrations, and the ability to write and access the cache. This endpoint can be provided to uptime monitoring services like Pingdom, Nagios, and NewRelic.

Once you have the access token, health information can be retrieved as plain text, JSON, or XML using the health_check endpoint:

  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.xml?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

You can also ask for the status of specific services:

  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/cache.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/database.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/migrations.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

For example, the JSON output of the following health check:

curl --header "TOKEN: ACCESS_TOKEN" https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json

would be like:

{"healthy":true,"message":"success"}

On failure, the endpoint will return a 500 HTTP status code. On success, the endpoint will return a valid successful HTTP status code, and a success message. Ideally your uptime monitoring should look for the success message.