Health check probes

The readiness check endpoint has two states:

• 200 OK: when Kong Gateway is ready.
• 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable: when Kong Gateway is not ready.

The readiness endpoint does not return detailed information about the node status, but it is still useful for load balancers and other tools that need to monitor the readiness of Kong Gateway instances.

To use the /status/ready endpoint, enable the status API server in kong.conf, and specify the port you want to use. Readiness probes should be enabled on all nodes, including standalone, Control Plane, and Data Plane nodes.

status_listen = 0.0.0.0:8100

For information on configuring kong.conf review the Managing Kong Gateway configuration documentation

For each Kong Gateway node, there are two types of health checks:

• Liveness: The /status endpoint responds with a 200 OK status if Kong Gateway is running. Use:

  curl -i http://localhost:8100/status
  

• Readiness: The /status/ready endpoint responds with 200 OK if Kong Gateway has a valid config and is ready to serve. Use:

  curl -i http://localhost:8100/status/ready
  

These endpoints follow the Kubernetes health check probe patterns. Liveness may return 200 OK before readiness. Only use readiness probes to determine if a node is ready to receive traffic.

Readiness varies by deployment type. A 200 OK can mean something different depending on the configuration.

Update readinessProbe in your deployment:

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /status/ready
    port: 8100
  initialDelaySeconds: 10
  periodSeconds: 5