ASP.NET Core 2.2 introduces a range of new features. One of the more interesting (IMO) is Health Checks. You may use tools like Pingdom or elmah.io Uptime Monitoring to ping your website in a specified interval. Pinging a single HTML page may or may not reveal if your application is healthy or not. Health Checks to the rescue! Before trying out the code yourself, make sure to install the recent version of ASP.NET Core 2.2 and Visual Studio 2017.

When developing a new service, I typically define a custom route (like /working). This endpoint is requested by Uptime Monitoring, and a notification is sent if things stop working. How /working is implemented, is up to each API. Some APIs may require a database connection, while others need something completely else. Until now, one of my custom health endpoints could have looked something like this:

[Route("working")]
public ActionResult Working()
{
    using (var connection = new SqlConnection(_connectionString))
    {
        try
        {
            connection.Open();
        }
        catch (SqlException)
        {
            return new HttpStatusCodeResult(503, "Generic error");
        }
    }

    return new EmptyResult();
}

#aspdotnet core #aspdotnet