In this video, you'll learn about OCI health checks. Where is this health check feature available in OCI? Go to the menu and under monitoring, you have health checks available. If you remember, in Load Balancer, there was a health check available which is a self-contained service for the Load Balancer health and the back-end set and backend server. Here, the idea behind creating health checks is for monitoring any public IPs you have in OCI. Could be a Load Balancer, could be Compute instances or whatever you have as a public resource. I will take, for example, webserver 1 as a health check target. I can evaluate from different vantage points as to how this particular target is reachable from these locations. As you can see, Oracle has got various resources published in different cloud providers, which are public-facing resources. From these vantage points, you can check how your target, which is a public IP, is reachable from the various locations. The data that is produced by health check is only a streaming dataset based on the health check. You can use this health check along with traffic steering, which we will see in the next video about traffic steering and management, as to how you can failover load balance your services. When you have different vantage points and you want to check that target's availability, you have the ability to do a HTTP based request or a Ping request to check the health of your resources. If you're doing a HTTP you choose what protocol port you want to use, any specific URL to be given. In case you want to use any HTTP headers etc you can give it, and the interval in which you want to have these health checks captured. Thus, with health checks, you are able to configure in a simple UI the availability of public IP based resources in your tenancy, and also get performance data about the response time of your health check that you are doing from different vantage points. This gives you the ability to do on-demand performance tests to see when you are setting up a new application in OCI with a public IP, how is it reachable from different locations around the world? As I told you earlier, you can use it along with traffic management for a failover or load balancing, which we will see later. You can have configuration of alerting using APIs so that in case there is a delay, you can have integration with notification and get alerted. You can also monitor hybrid resources across different cloud providers if you have various resources put up in other cloud providers environmental. The idea behind health check is to continuously monitor the public facing endpoints that you might have and, as and when required, add additional probes or vantage points to check the availability and performance. The vantage points are from different locations, which gives you geo-location based performance. Both HTTP and Ping based performance monitoring can be done for the public IP. With that, we come to the end of this chapter of health checks and traffic management. In the traffic management video, you will learn about; how do you use traffic management, and use health checks as a complement to use it with traffic management.
