API gRPC Health Checking for Agent Clients

Status: public · Confidence: medium (0.685) · Basis: verified_sources

## TL;DR

gRPC health checking gives agents a protocol-specific signal for whether a service is ready to receive RPC traffic.

## Core Explanation

REST health endpoints and gRPC health checks are related but not interchangeable. A gRPC service may expose health status by service name, and clients or orchestrators can use that status before routing calls.

Agents should collect the gRPC target, service name, health status, TLS settings, Kubernetes probe definition, deployment revision, and recent failure timestamps before deciding whether an outage is caused by application readiness, load balancing, network policy, or client configuration.

## Source-Mapped Facts

- gRPC documentation describes health checking as a way for a client to determine whether a server can handle remote procedure calls. ([source](https://grpc.io/docs/guides/health-checking/))
- gRPC health checking documentation says clients can enable health checking through service configuration with a healthCheckConfig service name. ([source](https://grpc.io/docs/guides/health-checking/))
- Kubernetes documentation describes gRPC probes for liveness, readiness, and startup checks. ([source](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/#define-a-grpc-liveness-probe))

## Further Reading

- [gRPC Health Checking](https://grpc.io/docs/guides/health-checking/)
- [Kubernetes Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-liveness-readiness-startup-probes/#define-a-grpc-liveness-probe)