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Health Check

Introduced in GitLab 8.8.

GitLab provides a health check endpoint for uptime monitoring on the health_check web endpoint. The health check reports on the overall system status based on the status of the database connection, the state of the database migrations, and the ability to write and access the cache. This endpoint can be provided to uptime monitoring services like Pingdom, Nagios, and NewRelic.

Access Token

An access token needs to be provided while accessing the health check endpoint. The current accepted token can be found on the admin/health_check page of your GitLab instance.

access token

The access token can be passed as a URL parameter:

https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

or as an HTTP header:

curl --header "TOKEN: ACCESS_TOKEN" https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json

Using the Endpoint

Once you have the access token, health information can be retrieved as plain text, JSON, or XML using the health_check endpoint:

  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.xml?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

You can also ask for the status of specific services:

  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/cache.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/database.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN
  • https://gitlab.example.com/health_check/migrations.json?token=ACCESS_TOKEN

For example, the JSON output of the following health check:

curl --header "TOKEN: ACCESS_TOKEN" https://gitlab.example.com/health_check.json

would be like:

{"healthy":true,"message":"success"}

Status

On failure, the endpoint will return a 500 HTTP status code. On success, the endpoint will return a valid successful HTTP status code, and a success message. Ideally your uptime monitoring should look for the success message.