What is a Health Monitor?

The load balancing service includes a health monitoring operation that periodically checks the health of the nodes associated with your load balancer to ensure they are responding correctly. You can only enable one health monitor per load balancer.

Why is a Health Monitor important?

If the health monitor determines that a node is not responding, the node is removed from the load balancer's rotation until the health monitor determines that the node is functional. The Health Monitor performs health checks of each node periodically, including new nodes that are added to the load balancer. By performing these health checks, the health monitor helps keep your load balancer operating smoothly by routing traffic only to nodes that are functioning properly.

To Create a Health Monitor

1. Click Load Balancers at the top of the Control Panel. All existing load balancers for your account are displayed.
2. Click the Actions cog next to the name of the load balancer and select Edit Health Monitoring.
3. Select a Monitor Type:

• Connect — The connect health monitor connects to each node on its defined port to ensure that the service is listening properly. The connect monitor is the most basic type of health check and does no postprocessing or protocol-specific health checks. Fill in the required fields for the connect monitor:
  • Interval — Minimum number of seconds to wait before executing the health monitor. (Must be a number between 1 and 3600.)
  • Timeout — Maximum number of seconds to wait for a connection to be established before timing out. (Must be a number between 1 and 300.)
  • Attempts — Number of permissible monitor failures before removing a node from rotation. (Must be a number between 1 and 10.)
• HTTP — The HTTP health monitor is more intelligent than the connect monitor. It can process an HTTP response to determine the actual condition of a node. Fill in the required fields for the HTTP monitor:
  • Interval — Minimum number of seconds to wait before executing the health monitor. (Must be a number between 1 and 3600.)
  • Timeout — Maximum number of seconds to wait for a connection to be established before timing out. (Must be a number between 1 and 300.)
  • Attempts — Number of permissible monitor failures before removing a node from rotation. (Must be a number between 1 and 10.)
  • HTTP Path — The HTTP path that will be used in the sample request.
  • Status Regex — A regular expression that will be used to evaluate the HTTP status code returned in the response. For example you could use the regular expression "^(500|40[1348])$" to look for unsuccessful status codes (500, 401, 403, 404, and 408) returned in the response or use the regular expression "^[2][0][02]$" to look for successful status codes of 200 and 202 in the response.
  • Body Regex — A regular expression that will be used to evaluate the contents of the body of the response. For example you could use the regular expression "^.*(Unauthorized|Forbidden|Not Found|Timeout|Server Error).*$" to look for any of those potentially problematic strings in the body of the response or use the regular expression "^success$" to look for the string "success".

4. Click Save Monitoring Settings.

You have now completed configuring a health monitor for your load balancer. To disable the health monitor, follow steps 1 and 2 above, and then click Disable in the Health Monitor pop-oever.