Back End Module Health Check Protocol
NOTICE
This decision has been migrated to the Technical Council's Decision Log as part of a consolidation effort. See: DR-000007 - Back End Module Health Check Protocol
Context
Need
System operators need to be able to understand if a module instance is healthy enough to be able to participate in the system. FOLIO needs a standard way of allowing operators to determine this.
Previous Decisions
4 years ago RAML Module Builder defined the /admin/health
endpoint for checking the health of a module. More recently this was included in the formal expectations of a module. Both of these state that the module should always respond with a 200 status code.
Alternative Proposals
John Malconian has proposed that instead of the "health" endpoint, two endpoints: for readiness and liveness check. See the proposal here: - OKAPI-904Getting issue details... STATUS . The proposal has been implemented in Okapi but has not seen much uptake.
Decision
All back end modules included in the 2021 R2 (and later) distribution must provide a health check endpoint
Protocol Design
The health check endpoint must be provided at the path /admin/health
The endpoint must respond with a status code 200
The response may include a body of any form
Rationale
This topic was discussed at the /wiki/spaces/TLG/pages/754372.
It was agreed that:
- The existing path should continue to be used given that system operators already rely on it for some modules
- A module is considered healthy if it can respond to requests to the health check endpoint, no other criteria applies at this point
- Discussion about any additional criteria for the health of a back end module has been deferred
Implementation Guidance
Spring Way
For comfortable using health check in spring way - we can use dependency: `spring-boot-starter-actuator`. Just add it in pom.xml:
<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId> <version>2.3.4.RELEASE</version> </dependency>
By default, the health endpoint is mapped to `/actuator/health`. To change it we should add property in the application.properties:
management.endpoints.web.base-path=/admin
Also swagger automatically generate endpoint on the UI if you use swagger UI:
Example of using:
GET /admin/health HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:8080
{ "status": "UP" }
Documentation: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-features.html