Kong Health Checks

1

Hi Team,

How to verify Kong gateway and Kong ingress controller health with a browser hit or a click , any documentation is appreciated for configuring the Kong health checks

2

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but we have a cluster of Kong proxies behind a load balancer. So the LB knows whether or not a proxy node should remain in the pool, we have a separate service/route configured which uses the request termination plugin to return a predefined “alive” response which the load balancer uses as its health check URL … so long as it gets that response back from a proxy node, it assumes it is healthy and can have requests routed to it.

3

Hi @shawnc1959 ,
i want to know kong gateway is running or not , how do we check that ?

4

Well, we took the approach that if we get a successful response from that “heartbeat” API, then the gateway must be functioning.

The admin API does have a status endpoint that you can call; see Admin API - v2.5.x | Kong Docs

Lastly, the Kong executable has a “health” parameter which you can run interactively, but the output is pretty basic, e.g.:

$ sudo /usr/local/bin/kong health
nginx.......running

Kong is healthy at /usr/local/kong
5

Hi @shawnc1959 , thanks for the above info , how do we check health check of kong ingress controller ?

6

We don’t use the ingress controller, so afraid I don’t have any experience with that. But since it’s based on Kong, the status endpoint might also be exposed by it.

7

  • Kong Admin
    You can use kong-gateway–admin-url/status for admin health check.

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  • Kong Proxy
    For proxy health check, we can acheive this using Kong Request Termination Plugin.
    For this,
    Create a new Route using Kong Admin API or Kong Manager.
    Provide Route name, skip the service field, provide path as something like /health/status and save it.

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Then open that Route from Kong Manager, select plugin and add Request Termination Plugin.

In Request Termination Plugin fields, select Scoped, select the Route created in the above step, Provide a custom message in the Message field and add Status Code as 200.

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Now you can access it as kong-proxy-url/health/status