---
title: "Health Checks"
metaTitle: "Health Check Endpoint for Monitoring Vendure"
metaDescription: "How Vendure exposes a /health endpoint for monitoring system dependencies like the database and external services, built on NestJS Terminus."
---

Vendure exposes a **`/health`** endpoint that reports the status of critical system dependencies.
This endpoint is essential for production deployments where load balancers, container orchestrators,
and monitoring tools need to know whether the application is healthy and ready to serve traffic.

## How it works

The health check system is built on the [NestJS Terminus](https://docs.nestjs.com/recipes/terminus)
module. Each configured health check strategy probes a specific dependency and reports back with
a status. The `/health` endpoint aggregates all strategy results into a single response.

A healthy response indicates that all dependencies are reachable and functioning correctly. If any
strategy reports a failure, the endpoint returns an unhealthy status, signaling that the system
may not be able to serve requests reliably.

## Built-in strategies

Vendure ships with two health check strategies out of the box:

- **`TypeORMHealthCheckStrategy`** — verifies that the database connection is alive by executing
  a simple query. Since the database is the most critical dependency for any Vendure instance,
  this strategy is enabled by default.

- **`HttpHealthCheckStrategy`** — checks the availability of an external HTTP service. This is
  useful when your Vendure instance depends on external APIs, such as a payment gateway or a
  third-party inventory system.

## Configuration

Health checks are configured via the `systemOptions.healthChecks` property in the
[`VendureConfig`](/reference/typescript-api/configuration/vendure-config/). You can enable or disable
individual strategies and configure their parameters to match your infrastructure.

## Use cases

The `/health` endpoint serves several important operational purposes:

- **Load balancer probes** — configure your load balancer to poll `/health` and route traffic
  only to healthy instances.
- **Container orchestration** — use the endpoint as a Kubernetes liveness or readiness probe
  to automatically restart unhealthy pods or delay traffic until the application is ready.
- **Monitoring dashboards** — integrate with monitoring tools to track uptime and get alerted
  when dependencies become unreachable.

## Custom strategies

When your application has dependencies beyond the database and HTTP services, you can implement
the `HealthCheckStrategy` interface to create custom checks. For example, a custom strategy might
verify connectivity to a Redis cache, an Elasticsearch cluster, or a message broker.

Custom strategies are added to the same `systemOptions.healthChecks` configuration array alongside
the built-in strategies, and their results are included in the aggregated `/health` response.

## Further reading

- [Production configuration guide](/deployment/production-configuration/) — deploying Vendure with proper health checks and monitoring
