Configure Health Checks (Optional)

v4.2.3

Overview

Health checks are the industry standard for the initial diagnostic step of the troubleshooting process, which provides information about the health and readiness of XMPro services. The health checks achieve this by performing periodic evaluations of connected services - each of which returns a status of healthy or unhealthy.

The health checks are disabled by default. Once the health checks are turned on, you can opt to view them in the Health UI or add the endpoints to your existing business application health monitoring IT solution.

It is also possible to include third-party endpoints - enabling you to monitor all of your health checks in a central location.

Health Endpoints

Each XMPro service has an endpoint that can be accessed to determine its overall health. The following health checks are performed to test different dependencies:

1. Connection to other XMPro services

2. Connection to the databases

3. Connection to Redis Cache

The raw JSON of the results can be accessed through the health path of the service's URL. For example, https://xmpro-ad-sample.azurewebsites.net/health

Fig 1: Healthy JSON output using Postman

Below is the description for each entry in the health check:

Property	Description
Data	Additional data provided by the health check. By default, this is empty.
Description	An optional explanation of the health check.
Duration	The amount of time that the health check took to run.
Status	The health check status options are: Healthy (the connection succeeds) Unhealthy (the connection fails or times out)
Tags	Labels that are used to group or describe the kind of health check being done.

Health UI

The UI provides a user-friendly display of the responses from the health endpoints.

To access the health checks performed, visit the health UI of any of the services using the health-ui path. For example, https://xmpro-ad-sample.azurewebsites.net/health-ui

Fig 2: The Health Checks interface

Configure Health Checks

The following steps describe how to turn on the health check functionality.

Application Designer

1. Navigate to the IIS location where Application Designer has been installed.

2. Open the App Designer appsettings.json file.

3. Set enableHealthCheck in the featureFlags object to true.

This feature flag turns on both the /health and /health-ui endpoints.

Fig 3: Step 3

4. Configure the URLs you want to include in the health checks within the healthChecks object. The standard endpoint for each XMPro service is /health/ping.

"healthChecks": {
      "urls": [
        {
          "url": "<subscription manager url>/health/ping",
          "name": "Subscription Manager API",
          "tags": [ "api" ]
        },
        {
          "url": "<data stream designer url>/health/ping",
          "name": "Data Stream Designer API",
          "tags": [ "api" ]
        }
      ]
    }

5. Configure the /health endpoints you want to include in the UI within the HealthChecksUI object.

"HealthChecksUI": {
  "HealthChecks": [
    {
      "name": "Application Designer",
      "Uri": "<application designer url>/health"
    },
    {
      "name": "Data Stream Designer",
      "Uri": "<data stream designer url>/health"
    }
  ]
}

Fig 4: Step 4 and 5

6. Save the file.

7. Restart the Application Designer service.

Data Stream Designer

Repeat the above steps for Data Stream Designer, using these values for step 4:

"healthChecks": {
  "urls": [
    {
      "url": "<subscription manager url>/health/ping",
      "name": "Subscription Manager API",
      "tags": [ "api" ]
    },
    {
      "url": "<application designer url>/health/ping",
      "name": "Application Designer API",
      "tags": [ "api" ]
    }
  ]
}

Adding Third-Party Endpoints

Third-party endpoints are supported and can be included as part of the health check. These are added in the same place as the XMPro service health checks.

Only endpoints that do not need additional authorization are currently supported for the health checks.

1. Open the appsettings.json file.

2. Add third-party endpoints to the healthChecks object.

3. Save the file and restart the XMPro product service.

Fig 5: Step 3

Below are the properties in this configuration when including other URLs in the health check:

Property	Description
url	Determines the URL to check.
name	Determines the name/identifier of the health check to be performed.
tags	Determines the tag for the health check. This is useful for tagging/grouping health checks.
timeout	The amount of time to wait for a response from the site. The health check will return as Unhealthy if the timeout is reached while waiting for the URL. By default, this is empty and will wait for the URL indefinitely.