Creating an ASP.NET diagnostics page to be pinged by Load Balancer

Question

Our server operations team has asked the web development team (ASP.NET) to provide a URL in our application, which the load balancer can ping to perform health checks.

What should be executed on this page? I think we should attempt a database connection to ensure connectivity between the web and database. Anything else?

Answer 1

Your health-check page should ping any external dependencies in your application and make sure everything is responding properly. That includes:

• Databases

• Web Services

• Dynamically Loaded DLLs

• COM+ Components

If all the tests pass, then the health-check page should respond properly so the load balancer can use that server.

Answer 2

Really you want to check the database configuration, asp.net configuration, web.config and any other webservices or dependancies.

Here is a really great codeproject that will get you started with minimal coding.