In the dynamic landscape of containerized applications, ensuring your software's reliability, availability, and optimal performance is crucial.

The importance of health checks

Health checks serve as the first line of defense in guaranteeing the stability of your applications. By systematically verifying critical aspects of your software, such as startup readiness and ongoing liveness, Magic containers provide a mechanism to prevent potential issues before they impact your users. Understanding and effectively implementing health checks can significantly enhance the resilience of your containerized applications.

Health check types

Magic containers offer three distinct types of health checks, each serving a unique purpose:

Startup check

• Validates whether your application has successfully started.
• Delays routing requests until the application is in a stable state.

Readiness check

• Ensures that the application is fully prepared to handle incoming requests.
• This is a recommended step to detect when the application is ready to receive traffic, minimizing the risk of failed requests.

Liveness check

• Monitors the active runtime status of your application.
• Acts as a continuous assurance that your application is running smoothly without encountering issues.

📘

Note

Enabling health checks in Magic containers is straightforward. To learn more, see our Defining health checks guide.

Monitoring your application's pulse

While health checks provide a crucial snapshot of your application's immediate status, monitoring expands the horizon by offering a continuous and comprehensive view of its overall health. Magic containers provide a rich set of metrics, each serving as a vital sign for your application's pulse:

Latency

• Measures the time it takes for your application to respond to requests.
• Offers insights into the responsiveness and efficiency of your application.

Instances & active regions

• Tracks the number of instances running and their distribution across active regions.
• Provides an overview of your application's geographical presence and redundancy.

Traffic served

• Monitors the volume of incoming and outgoing traffic.
• A key metric for understanding your application's popularity and user engagement.

CPU usage

• Gauges the utilization of the CPU resources by your application.
• It helps in optimizing resource allocation and identifying potential bottlenecks.

Memory Usage

• Essential for ensuring efficient memory management and overall application stability.
• Measures the utilization of memory resources by your application.

You can access these insightful metrics through the Statistics section of the container dashboard :

This monitoring approach empowers you to make informed decisions, proactively identify trends, and ensure your app's continuous and optimal performance.