Route 53 - Health Checks

What are Health Checks?

Route 53 Health Checks let AWS automatically monitor your resources (like servers or apps) and redirect traffic if something goes down.

Important Rule

HTTP Health Checks only work for PUBLIC resources. They cannot directly check private resources inside a VPC.

Health Check = Automated DNS Failover

There are 3 types of health checks:

Type 1 - Monitor an Endpoint

• Watches a specific application, server, or AWS resource directly.
• This is the most common type.

Type 2 - Calculated Health Checks

• Combines the results of multiple health checks into a single one.
• You can use OR, AND, or NOT logic.
• Can monitor up to 256 child health checks.
• You specify how many child checks need to pass for the parent to pass.
• Useful for doing website maintenance without causing all health checks to fail.

Type 3 - Monitor CloudWatch Alarms

• Watches CloudWatch alarms (e.g., DynamoDB throttling, RDS alarms, custom metrics).
• Useful for private resources since Route 53 cannot directly check them.

Note: Health Checks are integrated with CloudWatch (CW) metrics.

Monitoring an Endpoint - Details

About 15 global health checkers will check your endpoint's health from different locations around the world.