mcpbeat

Health Check Endpoints

secondsky/health-check-endpoints

Health check endpoints for liveness, readiness, dependency monitoring. Use for Kubernetes, load balancers, auto-scaling, or encountering probe failures, startup delays, dependency checks, timeout configuration errors.

This is a copy. The original lives at comeonoliver/health-check-endpoints.

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on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository
npx skills add https://github.com/secondsky/claude-skills --skill health-check-endpoints

The instruction itself

7 sections, as written by the author

Health Check Endpoints

Implement health checks for monitoring service availability and readiness.

Probe Types

| Probe | Purpose | Failure Action |

|-------|---------|----------------|

| Liveness | Is process alive? | Restart container |

| Readiness | Can handle traffic? | Remove from LB |

| Startup | Has app started? | Delay other probes |

| Deep | All deps healthy? | Trigger alerts |

Implementation (Express)

class HealthChecker {
  async checkDatabase() {
    const start = Date.now();
    try {
      await db.query('SELECT 1');
      return { status: 'healthy', latency: Date.now() - start };
    } catch (err) {
      return { status: 'unhealthy', error: String(err?.message || err) };
    }
  }

  async checkRedis() {
    try {
      await redis.ping();
      return { status: 'healthy' };
    } catch (err) {
      return { status: 'unhealthy', error: err.message };
    }
  }

  async getReadiness() {
    const checks = await Promise.all([
      this.checkDatabase(),
      this.checkRedis()
    ]);
    const healthy = checks.every(c => c.status === 'healthy');
    return { healthy, checks };
  }
}

// Liveness - lightweight
app.get('/health/live', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ status: 'ok', timestamp: new Date().toISOString() });
});

// Readiness - check dependencies
app.get('/health/ready', async (req, res) => {
  const health = await healthChecker.getReadiness();
  res.status(health.healthy ? 200 : 503).json(health);
});

Kubernetes Configuration

livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/live
    port: 3000
  initialDelaySeconds: 15
  periodSeconds: 10
  failureThreshold: 3

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health/ready
    port: 3000
  initialDelaySeconds: 5
  periodSeconds: 10

Best Practices

  • Keep liveness checks minimal (no external deps)
  • Check only critical systems in readiness
  • Return 200 for healthy, 503 for unhealthy
  • Set reasonable timeouts to prevent cascading failures
  • Include response time metrics

Additional Implementations

See references/implementations.md for:

  • Python Flask complete health checker
  • Java Spring Boot Actuator
  • Full Kubernetes deployment config

Never Do

  • Make liveness depend on external services
  • Return 200 when dependencies are down
  • Skip dependency checks in readiness

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take secondsky/health-check-endpoints from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.