Identifying unhealthy targets of Elastic Load Balancer
How can you get notified WHICH of your Targets or EC2 instances went un-healthy? This describes at a high level this blog post about how you can better track and understand your application health behind an Elastic Load Balancer.
The Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service provides you with Amazon CloudWatch metrics (HealthyHostCount and UnhealthyHostCount) to monitor the targets behind your load balancers.
Although the unhealthy host count metric gives the aggregate number of failed hosts, there is a common pain point when you create an alarm for unhealthy hosts based on these metrics.
This is because there is no easy way for you to tell which target was or is unhealthy. The easiest way for you to identify an unhealthy host is to check all of your targets and see which one stops receiving new requests. This blog post proposes an AWS serverless solution to help you identify the unhealthy target of a load balancer.
To address this, we use an AWS Lambda function to identify unhealthy targets and send an email notification that includes the load balancer name, Region, AWS account, timestamp, failed target IDs, HealthyHostCount, and cause of failure. The unhealthy targets are listed in JSON format so it’s easy to consume and conduct further processing. Also, the Lambda function can run an “OnDemandHealthCheck”, which sends a health check to the targets that went unhealthy, and reports if they’re pass or fail, and why.
This offers a direct view of the cause of health check failure. This offers a direct view of the cause of health check failure. This solution supports all load balancer types including Classic Load Balancer (CLB), Application Load Balancer (ALB), and Network Load Balancer (NLB).
