Overview of uptime checks

To determine, from the perspective of a user or external system, if resources are available and behaving as expected, use uptime checks. An uptime check is a request sent to a resource to see whether it responds.

An uptime check consists of the following components:

  • The uptime-check configuration you create. This configuration is used to schedule continuous requests from Google Cloud regions to the target in your uptime-check configuration.
  • The request-execution system, provided by Google Cloud, that manages the following:
    • Execution of configured checks
    • Validation of results
    • Writing the results to uptime-check metrics.

After you create an uptime check, you can use an alerting policy to monitor the uptime check and notify you if the resource fails to respond.

There are two types of uptime checks:

  • Public uptime checks issue requests from multiple locations throughout the world to publicly available URLs or Google Cloud resources.
  • Private uptime checks issue requests to internal IP addresses of Google Cloud resources. This feature is in Preview.

The words public and private describe the resources being checked.

The requests made on behalf of uptime checks originate from checkers that reside in several Google Cloud regions. The uptime-check region USA has three checkers. The uptime-check regions EUROPE, SOUTH_AMERICA, and ASIA_PACIFIC each have one checker. When you create an uptime check, you must specify at least three checkers, or you can request that all uptime checkers issue requests. An uptime check succeeds if the resource responds and any requirements of the uptime-check configuration are met.

You can observe the results of uptime checks in the Google Cloud console for uptime checks. The following screenshot shows an example of the Uptime checks page:

Sample uptime checks overview.

You can also monitor the availability of a resource by creating an alerting policy that creates an incident when the uptime check fails. The alerting policy can be configured to notify you by email or through a different channel, and that notification can include details about the resource that failed to respond.

The results of uptime checks are written to Cloud Monitoring metrics, and alerting policies monitor these metrics. For more information on these metrics, see the uptime_check entries in the monitoring metrics table.

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