AWS ELB PING is considered to be an unreliable method to check ELB connectivity. Read on to learn what to do instead. 

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our AWS Support Services.

Let’s take a look at how our AWS Support Team helped our customers with testing ELB connectivity without AWS ELB PING.

How to test ELB connectivity without AWS ELB PING

An ELB or Elastic Load Balancer is a single service that contains several Load Balancing servers that cover the Availability zones and subnets we nominate.

In fact, Load Balancers are responsible for passing requests as well as returning responses. Although is suitable for web-type traffic, it might not work out when we require a more permanent solution like SSH.

If you are looking for a way to check whether the AWS ELB is working properly, you have come to the right place.

The PING feature is disabled in Security Groups by default as it may expose services. It is better to test connectivity via expected protocols like HTTP requests for better security.

For instance, HTTP and HTTPS health check requests have host headers that have the load balancer node and listener node’s IP address. However, it does not contain the target’s IP address or health check port.

We can add a TLS listener to the Network Load Balancer and carry out a listener connectivity test. Then, we can see TCP Pings as a result since a new TCP connection is set between our load balancer and targets. It is possible to pinpoint these TCP pings since it contains the source IP address of our Network Load Balancer. In addition, the connections do not consist of any data packets.

However, for a UDP service, the connectivity can be tested via non-UDP health checks. We can use any health check and any port on the target to ensure the availability of a UDP service.

At the end of the day, our Support Team recommends not to use AWS ELB Ping and rather test the connectivity via expected protocols.

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Conclusion

To conclude, our skilled AWS Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated how to test ELB connectivity without AWS ELB PING.