How to Use gRPC Health Checking in Go

Go's standard library does not include a native gRPC health checking implementation; you must use the google.golang.org/grpc/health package. Register the health service on your gRPC server and implement the Check method to return your service's status.

import (
	"google.golang.org/grpc/health"
	"google.golang.org/grpc/health/grpc_health_v1"
)

// ... inside your server setup
hs := health.NewServer()
hs.SetServingStatus("", grpc_health_v1.HealthCheckResponse_SERVING)

// Register the health service with your gRPC server
grpc_health_v1.RegisterHealthServer(grpcServer, hs)

Use hs.SetServingStatus(service, status) to update the health of specific services, where service is an empty string for the overall server or a specific service name, and status is SERVING, NOT_SERVING, or UNKNOWN.

gRPC health checking is a standard way for load balancers and clients to verify if a service is running and ready to accept traffic. Since Go's built-in HTTP/2 support doesn't include this specific protocol, you need to add the official gRPC health package to your project. It works like a simple status light that tells other systems if your application is healthy or needs to be restarted.