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Health checks with Terminus

April 14, 2023

Monitoring tools use health checks to check if service and external dependencies (like a database) are up and running and take some action (like sending alerts) for the unhealthy state.

Terminus provides a set of health indicators.

Liveness probe

An HTTP endpoint checks if the service is up and running.

// health.controller.ts
import { Controller, Get } from '@nestjs/common';
import { ApiTags } from '@nestjs/swagger';
import {
HealthCheck,
HealthCheckResult,
HealthCheckService,
HealthIndicatorResult,
TypeOrmHealthIndicator
} from '@nestjs/terminus';
import { CustomConfigService } from 'common/config/custom-config.service';
@ApiTags('health')
@Controller('health')
export class HealthController {
constructor(
private readonly healthCheckService: HealthCheckService,
private readonly configService: CustomConfigService,
private readonly database: TypeOrmHealthIndicator
) {}
@Get('liveness')
@HealthCheck()
async check(): Promise<HealthCheckResult> {
return this.healthCheckService.check([
async (): Promise<HealthIndicatorResult> => ({
[this.configService.SERVICE_NAME]: { status: 'up' }
})
]);
}
// ...
}

A successful response is like the one below.

{
"status": "ok",
"info": {
"nestjs-starter": {
"status": "up"
}
},
"error": {},
"details": {
"nestjs-starter": {
"status": "up"
}
}
}

Readiness probe

An HTTP endpoint checks if the service is ready to receive the traffic and if all external dependencies are running.

// health.controller.ts
import { Controller, Get } from '@nestjs/common';
import { ApiTags } from '@nestjs/swagger';
import {
HealthCheck,
HealthCheckResult,
HealthCheckService,
HealthIndicatorResult,
TypeOrmHealthIndicator
} from '@nestjs/terminus';
import { CustomConfigService } from 'common/config/custom-config.service';
@ApiTags('health')
@Controller('health')
export class HealthController {
constructor(
private readonly healthCheckService: HealthCheckService,
private readonly configService: CustomConfigService,
private readonly database: TypeOrmHealthIndicator
) {}
// ...
@Get('readiness')
@HealthCheck()
async checkReadiness(): Promise<HealthCheckResult> {
return this.healthCheckService.check([
async (): Promise<HealthIndicatorResult> =>
this.database.pingCheck('postgres')
]);
}
}

Responses

  • Successful response
{
"status": "ok",
"info": {
"postgres": {
"status": "up"
}
},
"error": {},
"details": {
"postgres": {
"status": "up"
}
}
}
  • Response when the database is down
{
"status": "error",
"info": {},
"error": {
"postgres": {
"status": "down"
}
},
"details": {
"postgres": {
"status": "down"
}
}
}

Demo

The demo with the mentioned examples is available here.