Where does the convention of using /healthz for application health checks come from?

Question

In the Kubernetes/Docker ecosystem there is a convention of using /healthz as a health-check endpoint for applications.

Where does the name 'healthz' come from, and are there any particular semantics associated with that name?

Asparagine

Answer 1

It historically comes from Google’s internal practices. They're called "z-pages".

The reason it ends with z is to reduce collisions with actual application endpoints with the same name (like /status). See this talk for more: https://vimeo.com/173610242

Similar endpoints (at least inside Google) are /varz, /statusz, /rpcz. Services developed at Google automatically get these endpoints to export their health and metrics and there are tools that collect the exposed metrics/statuses from all the deployed services.

Open source tools like Prometheus implement this pattern (since original authors of Prometheus are also ex-Googlers) by coming to a well-known endpoint to collect metrics from your application. Similarly OpenCensus allows you to expose z-pages from your app (ideally on a different port) to diagnose problems.

Pusey

Go expvar golang.org/pkg/expvar is quite close to /varz – Quinque

@AhmeB: Thank you for the video link. it help me understand little more about healthz – Wretch

Question is answered at 26:55 in the talk (but this answer already contains pretty much the entire answer given by Kelsey). – Angelesangelfish

Ask about the employee who used the handle @statusz – Spectrogram