System health checks

System health checks may be part of a system monitoring strategy. They are typically used to gather metrics from the server hardware and platform software, such as:

• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Disk space
• Network connectivity

The results may trigger alerts so that corrective action can be taken to maintain stability.

A health check is distinct from a heartbeat. A health check reports on a node’s state, while a heartbeat only asserts that the node is alive. The two are complementary: health checks say how a node is doing, heartbeats say whether it is doing anything at all.