# Health Probe

> Implement liveness, readiness, and startup probes for application health monitoring

- **Category**: Cloud
- **Subcategory**: Foundational
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/k8s_health_probe/

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## Description
The Health Probe pattern implements liveness, readiness, and startup probes to monitor application health. Liveness probes determine when to restart containers, readiness probes indicate when containers are ready to serve traffic, and startup probes check if applications have started successfully. These probes enable Kubernetes to manage application lifecycle automatically.


## Use Cases
Use when you need to monitor application health or when you want Kubernetes to automatically handle unhealthy containers.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Automatic recovery from failures

- Prevents routing traffic to unready containers

- Enables graceful startup for slow applications

- Integrates with Kubernetes lifecycle management




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Requires careful probe configuration

- Incorrect probes can cause unnecessary restarts

- Adds complexity to application deployment







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://github.com/k8spatterns/examples/tree/master/foundational/HealthProbe)