DigitalOcean Load Balancer Health Check ensures the better performance of the Droplets. Bobcares responds to all queries, no matter how big or small, as part of our DigitalOcean Managed Services.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer Health Check

A health check is a scheduled HTTP or TCP request that we can set to run on a regular basis to ensure the health of a service. In case of the DigitalOcean, health checks ensure that the Droplets are available and meet any specific health requirements. Only requests that pass health checks will be forwarded by load balancers to Droplets. If the load balancer uses UDP in its forwarding rules, it must perform a health check with a port that uses TCP, HTTP, or HTTPS in order to function properly.

We can manage and modify a load balancer after we create it and add Droplets to it via its detail page.

1. Firstly, click Networking in the main navigation.
2. Then click Load Balancers to go to the load balancer index page.
3. Finally, click on an individual load balancer’s name to go to its detail page, which has three tabs, namely, Droplets, Graphs, and Settings. In the Settings tab, we can customize the health checks.

When we add Droplets to a load balancer, they begin in the DOWN state and remain there until they pass the load balancer’s health check. Once the backends have passed the required number of health checks, they will be marked as healthy, and the load balancer will start forwarding requests to them.

How To Customize DigitalOcean Load Balancer Health Check?

We can specify the Protocol, Port, and Path on which Droplets should respond in the Target section. In the Additional Settings section, we can customize the following:

• The Check Interval specifies how long (in seconds) the load balancer should wait between health checks.
• The Response Timeout determines how many seconds the load balancer will wait between responses.
• The Unhealthy Threshold is the number of times a Droplet must fail a health check in a row before the load balancer stops forwarding traffic to it.
• The Healthy Threshold specifies how many consecutive health checks a Droplet must pass before the load balancer will forward traffic to it.

More About DigitalOcean Load Balancer Health Check

A status code response in the range 200 – 399 is the success criterion for HTTP and HTTPS health checks. While completing a TCP handshake to connect is the success criteria for TCP health checks.

Since the default Apache page returns a 403 Forbidden HTTP response code, HTTP and HTTPS health checks may fail. The Droplets running Apache on Rocky Linux. So change the health check from HTTP/HTTPS to TCP. Else configure Apache to return a 200 OK response code by creating an HTML page in the Apache root directory.

Droplets will fail the load balancer’s health checks if backend services do not accept PROXY protocol headers.

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Conclusion

Health checks run on a regular basis to ensure the health of a service. Our Support team briefly explains the DigitalOcean Load Balancer Health Check including customizing the health check based on user preference.