With 47 years of bug production under my belt, I’ve seen a disturbing trend: people constantly asking their services “are you okay?” That’s not engineering. That’s helicopter parenting for servers.

Your code is an adult. Stop checking on it every 10 seconds.

What Health Checks Really Mean

When you add a /health endpoint, you’re saying:

# Translation: "I don't trust this code to work"
@app.get("/health")
def health_check():
    return {"status": "alive", "confidence": "low"}

If you wrote the code properly, you wouldn’t need to ask if it’s working. It would just work. Like how I never ask my 1997 Honda Civic if it’s okay. It starts, or it doesn’t. Natural selection.

The Kubernetes Inquisition

Kubernetes brought us liveness probes, readiness probes, startup probes… It’s like having three different people ask “are you sure you’re fine?” at a family dinner.

# The Anxiety-Driven Configuration
livenessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /health
    port: 8080
  initialDelaySeconds: 3
  periodSeconds: 10
  # Translation: "I'm checking on you every 10 seconds because I worry"

readinessProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /ready
    port: 8080
  # Translation: "Are you SURE you're ready? Really ready?"

startupProbe:
  httpGet:
    path: /startup
    port: 8080
  failureThreshold: 30
  # Translation: "Take your time, but I'm still watching"

As XKCD 908 eloquently puts it, the internet is made of duct tape. Adding health checks doesn’t change that—it just adds more anxiety.

Dilbert’s Dogbert on Monitoring

Dogbert would say: “Health checks are for people who can’t handle surprises. True leaders embrace the mystery of whether production is working.”

And Catbert, the evil HR director, would add: “We check the health of employees quarterly. Why would servers deserve more attention?”

The Real Cost of Health Checks

Activity Time Spent Value Added
Writing health endpoint 30 minutes None
Configuring probes 45 minutes Negative
Debugging false positives 4 hours Suffering
Explaining to PagerDuty why you’re ignoring alerts Eternal Personal growth

My Health Check Philosophy

# The Confident Approach
@app.get("/health")
def health():
    return "If you have to ask, you can't afford me"

# The Honest Approach  
@app.get("/health")
def health():
    import random
    return {"status": random.choice(["alive", "dead", "vibing"])}

# The Senior Engineer Approach
# (No health endpoint. Let them wonder.)

When Health Checks Fail You

True story: I once had a service that passed all health checks while silently corrupting data for six months. The health endpoint returned 200 OK every time, because technically the HTTP server was healthy.

Was the business logic working? Who can say. The health check didn’t ask.

@app.get("/health")
def health():
    # Checks if we can return JSON
    return {"healthy": True}
    # Does NOT check:
    # - Database connections
    # - Message queue
    # - External APIs
    # - Whether we've processed anything correctly this decade

The Alternative: Trust-Based Architecture

Instead of health checks, try these approaches:

1. The Ostrich Pattern

monitoring:
  enabled: false
  philosophy: "If I can't see the problems, they don't exist"

2. The Telepathy Pattern

def is_healthy():
    # Real engineers can sense when production is down
    # It's a cold feeling in your stomach at 3 AM
    pass

3. The Customer Feedback Pattern

def health_check():
    # If customers aren't complaining, everything is fine
    return check_twitter_for_outrage()

The PHB’s Wisdom

The Pointy-Haired Boss once told Dilbert: “We don’t need monitoring. If something breaks, someone will email us.”

He was fired three weeks later when the entire platform was down for a month without anyone noticing. But was he wrong? The users had moved on. Natural churn.

Why I Stopped Using Health Checks

2018: Added comprehensive health checks to all services.

2019: Health checks started failing randomly.

2020: Spent more time fixing health checks than actual bugs.

2021: Health check flapping caused 47 unnecessary restarts.

2022: Removed health checks. “Improved stability.”

2023: Production went down. Nobody noticed for 3 weeks.

2024: Received “Most Zen Engineer” award.

The Philosophical Angle

Health checks assume your service has a binary state: healthy or unhealthy. But life is nuanced. Maybe your service is:

  • Mostly healthy
  • Healthy-adjacent
  • In a healing journey
  • Taking a mental health day
  • Healthy but doesn’t want to talk about it

Who are we to reduce this complex existence to a boolean?

Conclusion

Stop micromanaging your services. They’re doing their best. If they crash, they crash. That’s called learning.

The only health check that matters is asking yourself: “Am I okay with not knowing if any of this works?”

If you can answer yes, you’re ready for senior engineering.

If you can answer yes while sipping coffee as the alerts fire, you’re ready for management.

The author hasn’t checked his production health in 5 years. He prefers the mystery. The servers prefer it too—they finally have some privacy.