BE-034 — Implement Backend Health Check & Readiness Service
📚 Overview
The Backend Health Check & Readiness Service provides a centralised mechanism for monitoring the operational status of every TruthBounty backend component. It exposes health, readiness, and liveness endpoints used by Kubernetes, load balancers, monitoring systems, CI/CD pipelines, and operations teams.
Rather than simply reporting that the API process is running, the service validates that all critical dependencies—including databases, Redis, blockchain RPC providers, messaging infrastructure, storage services, and third-party integrations—are functioning correctly before declaring the backend healthy.
This service forms a core part of TruthBounty's operational resilience strategy.
🧠 Background
TruthBounty relies on numerous infrastructure components.
These include:
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Blockchain RPC providers
- Event Bus
- IPFS Gateway
- Object Storage
- Email Service
- Notification Service
- Webhook Service
- Background Workers
If any of these services become unavailable, certain backend functionality may fail while the API itself continues running.
Health endpoints must therefore reflect actual operational readiness rather than simple process availability.
🎯 Objectives
Implement a production-grade health monitoring service that:
- exposes liveness endpoints
- exposes readiness endpoints
- verifies infrastructure dependencies
- measures component latency
- reports degraded services
- integrates with Kubernetes
- supports monitoring platforms
- improves operational visibility
🧩 Technical Scope
1. Liveness Endpoint
Implement:
This endpoint should verify that:
- application process is running
- server is responsive
- runtime is operational
No external dependency checks should be performed.
2. Readiness Endpoint
Implement:
Validate:
- PostgreSQL connectivity
- Redis connectivity
- Event Bus availability
- Blockchain RPC
- Storage service
- Background workers
- Internal service dependencies
Only return success when the application is capable of serving production traffic.
3. Detailed Health Endpoint
Implement:
Return:
- service status
- component statuses
- uptime
- version
- environment
- response times
- dependency diagnostics
4. Infrastructure Validation
Validate:
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Ethereum RPC
- Optimism RPC
- IPFS Gateway
- Email Provider
- Object Storage
- Notification Queue
Each dependency should report:
- Healthy
- Degraded
- Unavailable
5. Latency Monitoring
Measure:
- database latency
- Redis latency
- RPC latency
- storage latency
- event bus latency
Include measurements in health responses.
6. Graceful Degradation
Support degraded operation when non-critical services fail.
Examples:
- email unavailable
- analytics unavailable
- notification service unavailable
Core protocol functionality should remain available where possible.
7. Monitoring Integration
Provide compatibility with:
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Uptime monitoring
- Cloud load balancers
8. Caching
Cache expensive dependency checks for a configurable period to avoid excessive infrastructure load.
9. Configuration
Allow configuration of:
- timeout values
- retry counts
- cache duration
- dependency priorities
- failure thresholds
10. Future Extensibility
Design for future support of:
- multi-region deployments
- service mesh health
- cluster-wide diagnostics
- distributed tracing
- synthetic health tests
- automated recovery workflows
✅ Acceptance Criteria
- Liveness endpoint implemented.
- Readiness endpoint implemented.
- Detailed health endpoint available.
- Infrastructure dependencies validated.
- Latency metrics reported.
- Kubernetes readiness supported.
- Monitoring integrations verified.
- Documentation completed.
🧪 Testing Requirements
Implement tests covering:
- healthy infrastructure
- degraded services
- unavailable database
- unavailable Redis
- unavailable RPC
- timeout handling
- cached responses
- concurrent requests
- readiness transitions
Coverage target: 90%+
📚 Documentation
Update:
- Backend Documentation
- Operations Guide
- Infrastructure Documentation
- Kubernetes Deployment Guide
- Monitoring Documentation
- API Documentation
🔗 Dependencies
Depends on:
- BE-001 — Implement Backend Authentication Gateway
- BE-011 — Implement Backend Metrics Service
- BE-018 — Implement Event Bus & Domain Event Processing
- BE-021 — Implement Redis Cache & Distributed Session Management
- BE-033 — Implement Configuration Management Service
Blocks:
- Kubernetes Deployment
- Production Monitoring
- Auto Scaling
- CI/CD Health Validation
- Infrastructure Automation
🏷 Labels
- backend
- devops
- monitoring
- architecture
- complexity-low
- stellar-wave
📊 Complexity
Low
Although the implementation is relatively straightforward, it is critical for production deployments, automated scaling, high availability, and operational monitoring.
⏱ Estimated Effort
2–4 days
🚀 Definition of Done
- Health endpoints implemented.
- Dependency validation operational.
- Readiness checks verified.
- Liveness checks verified.
- Latency reporting implemented.
- Monitoring integration completed.
- Tests passing.
- Documentation updated.
- Ready for production deployment.
BE-034 — Implement Backend Health Check & Readiness Service
📚 Overview
The Backend Health Check & Readiness Service provides a centralised mechanism for monitoring the operational status of every TruthBounty backend component. It exposes health, readiness, and liveness endpoints used by Kubernetes, load balancers, monitoring systems, CI/CD pipelines, and operations teams.
Rather than simply reporting that the API process is running, the service validates that all critical dependencies—including databases, Redis, blockchain RPC providers, messaging infrastructure, storage services, and third-party integrations—are functioning correctly before declaring the backend healthy.
This service forms a core part of TruthBounty's operational resilience strategy.
🧠 Background
TruthBounty relies on numerous infrastructure components.
These include:
If any of these services become unavailable, certain backend functionality may fail while the API itself continues running.
Health endpoints must therefore reflect actual operational readiness rather than simple process availability.
🎯 Objectives
Implement a production-grade health monitoring service that:
🧩 Technical Scope
1. Liveness Endpoint
Implement:
This endpoint should verify that:
No external dependency checks should be performed.
2. Readiness Endpoint
Implement:
Validate:
Only return success when the application is capable of serving production traffic.
3. Detailed Health Endpoint
Implement:
Return:
4. Infrastructure Validation
Validate:
Each dependency should report:
5. Latency Monitoring
Measure:
Include measurements in health responses.
6. Graceful Degradation
Support degraded operation when non-critical services fail.
Examples:
Core protocol functionality should remain available where possible.
7. Monitoring Integration
Provide compatibility with:
8. Caching
Cache expensive dependency checks for a configurable period to avoid excessive infrastructure load.
9. Configuration
Allow configuration of:
10. Future Extensibility
Design for future support of:
✅ Acceptance Criteria
🧪 Testing Requirements
Implement tests covering:
Coverage target: 90%+
📚 Documentation
Update:
🔗 Dependencies
Depends on:
Blocks:
🏷 Labels
📊 Complexity
Low
Although the implementation is relatively straightforward, it is critical for production deployments, automated scaling, high availability, and operational monitoring.
⏱ Estimated Effort
2–4 days
🚀 Definition of Done