HealthBuddy

HealthBuddy is a service that periodically queries health endpoints of one or more services and generates alerts in case these queries fail.

It supports:

Notifications via:
- Microsoft Teams channel webhooks
- Pushover
A dashboard to observe the current status and history
Optional Basic Auth
Operation through an HTTP proxy
A configurable list of acceptable status codes
Spring boot actuator body evaluation based on a list of acceptable status

Installation

You can either rely on prebuilt binaries available on GitHub, build from source or use the docker image.

Docker

A docker-compose.yml is provided in this repository. It expects a properly configured application.yaml which will then be mounted into the container.

To download and run the latest version, create an application.yaml and then run:

$ docker-compose up -d

Building from Source

An execution of

./gradlew build

will generate a fat jar located under build/libs/.

Configuration

Save the following as application.yaml next to the binary for execution:

# The update interval (in ms)
updateInterval: 10000
# A list of services and their endpoints to be queried
services: 
  - name: my-service prod
    url: https://foo.bar/actuator/health
    allowedStatusCodes:
      - 200
  - name: other-service prod
    url: http://127.0.0.1
    allowedActuatorStatus:
      - UP
    userName: basicAuthUser
    password: basicAuthPass
notificationServices:
  # Configuration for Teams webhooks
  teams:
    hooks:
      - url: http://127.0.0.1/hook
  # Pushover configuration
  pushover:
    applicationToken: <token>
    recipients:
      - token: <token>
# Optional dashboard configuration
dashboard:
  historyWindowDuration: 15
  basePath: http://192.168.0.7:8080/
# Optional network configuration
network:
  httpProxyHost: 127.0.0.1
  httpProxyPort: 8080
  nonProxyHosts:
    - my-domain.com
  timeout: 5000
  followRedirects: false
# Optional reference endpoint configuration
referenceEndpoint:
  url: https://httpstat.us/200

Service Configuration

For each service, a name and a URL must be configured. Optionally, an environment can be specified which will be included in alerts.

By default, an established connection to the health endpoint is deemed a success. Additionally, lists of allowed HTTP status codes and lists of allowed actuator status can be specified that will then also be evaluated.

The actuator status evaluation assumes the response body to be of the following form (following the Spring Boot actuator schema):

{"status":"UP"}

If user name and password (both or none must be present) are provided, HealthBuddy will perform basic authentication when calling the health endpoint.

In addition to the config file, it is also possible to set parameters through the environment:

export NOTIFICATIONSERVICES_TEAMS_HOOKS_0_URL="http://127.0.0.1/hook"

Reference Endpoint

Optionally, a reference endpoint can be specified. This is useful if HealthBuddy itself is hosted in an environment that may become offline itself (e.g. a home network).

When specified, the reference endpoint will be queried to decide if an alert is to be suppressed or not. If the reference endpoint also cannot be reached, the alert is suppressed because it is assumed that the issue is with HealthBuddy itself.

Notification Services Configuration

It is possible to configure teams webhooks, pushover recipients, or both.

Teams Hook Configuration

One or more Teams hooks can be configured. At a minimum, a URL must be provided for each. Optionally, an environment pattern can be configured. This pattern restricts, incidents for which environment get sent to this hook.

The following example would send messages for the production environment to the first hook and messages for any environment starting with test to the second hook.

teams:
  hooks:
    - url: http://127.0.0.1/productionHook
      environmentPattern: "^production$"
    - url: http://127.0.0.1/testHook
      environmentPattern: "^test"

Pushover

In order to use the Pushover integration, you need to first register your instance of HealthBuddy as a new application. More information on this can be found here.

Afterwards a number of recipients can be configured. These can be either users identified by a user token or whole groups identified by a group token.

  pushover:
     applicationToken: <token>
     recipients:
        - token: <token>
          environmentPattern: "^production$"

Dashboard

HealthBuddy listens on port 8080 and provides a dashboard giving an overview of the status of all services grouped by environment. Additionally, an incident history is computed for each service. The duration of the history window can be configured via historyWindowDuration which is given in minutes.

If a basePath is configured, notification services will use it to link to the dashboard for quick access to the incident details.

Proxy Configuration

A proxy can be provided through any of the following means which take precedence in the order shown here:

Through the network section of the configuration file
Through Java system properties(http.proxyHost, https.proxyHost and corresponding port, user and Password variables as well as http.nonProxyHosts)
Through the environment variables HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY

dschanoeh / HealthBuddy