Health Check Analyzer

Analyzer ID	Category	Severity	Time To Fix
health-check	✅ Reliability	Medium	10 minutes

What This Checks

Validates that health check endpoints exist for infrastructure monitoring. Checks for:

• Existence of health check routes (/health, /healthz, /health-check, /status, /up, /ping)
• Health check depth (does it verify DB, cache, storage dependencies?)
• Laravel 11+ built-in health check route (/up)
• Scheduler monitoring (schedule:monitor or heartbeat patterns)

Why It Matters

• Load Balancer Integration: Load balancers need health endpoints to route traffic away from unhealthy instances
• Downtime Detection: Without health checks, outages are only detected when users report them
• Dependency Monitoring: Shallow health checks may report "healthy" when the database is down
• Scheduler Reliability: Unmonitored scheduled tasks can silently stop running

How to Fix

Quick Fix (5 minutes)

Add a basic health check route:

// routes/web.php
Route::get('/health', function () {
    return response()->json(['status' => 'ok']);
});

Proper Fix (10 minutes)

1. Add a deep health check that verifies dependencies:

// routes/web.php
Route::get('/health', function () {
    $checks = [];

    // Database
    try {
        DB::connection()->getPdo();
        $checks['database'] = 'ok';
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        $checks['database'] = 'failed';
    }

    // Cache
    try {
        Cache::store()->put('health-check', true, 10);
        Cache::store()->get('health-check');
        $checks['cache'] = 'ok';
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        $checks['cache'] = 'failed';
    }

    // Storage
    try {
        Storage::disk()->put('health-check.txt', 'ok');
        Storage::disk()->delete('health-check.txt');
        $checks['storage'] = 'ok';
    } catch (\Exception $e) {
        $checks['storage'] = 'failed';
    }

    $healthy = !in_array('failed', $checks);

    return response()->json([
        'status' => $healthy ? 'ok' : 'degraded',
        'checks' => $checks,
    ], $healthy ? 200 : 503);
});

2. Enable Laravel 11+ built-in health check:

// bootstrap/app.php
return Application::configure(basePath: dirname(__DIR__))
    ->withRouting(
        health: '/up',
    )
    ->create();

3. Add scheduler monitoring:

// routes/console.php
Schedule::command('inspire')
    ->hourly()
    ->pingOnSuccess('https://heartbeat.example.com/abc123');

References

• Laravel Health Check (11+)
• Kubernetes Health Checks
• Laravel Task Scheduling Monitoring

Related Analyzers

• Alerting Configuration - Validates alerting mechanisms
• Database Status - Checks database connectivity
• Cache Status - Checks cache connectivity