How to Implement Health Checks for Microservices in Go

Operations Observability
2026-04-17T12:05:42+00:00
Add an HTTP endpoint that pings your database and returns 200 OK if healthy or 503 if a dependency fails.

Implement health checks by exposing an HTTP endpoint that returns a 200 OK status only when all critical dependencies are available.

package main

import (
	"database/sql"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

var db *sql.DB

func main() {
	// Initialize DB connection (pseudo-code)
	// db, _ = sql.Open("postgres", os.Getenv("DB_URL"))

	http.HandleFunc("/health", healthHandler)
	http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

func healthHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	if err := db.Ping(); err != nil {
		http.Error(w, "DB connection failed", http.StatusServiceUnavailable)
		return
	}
	w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
	w.Write([]byte("OK"))
}