Properly planning health checks is important with any load balancer, and Application Request Routing (ARR) is no exception. This week I cover ARR in more depth by discussing the health checks, how to set them up, and some principles and tricks to live by.

Health checks are used to check the state of your servers so that if a server fails, it is automatically taken out of rotation, and then added back again when it has recovered. At first glance it may seem that minimal thought needs to go into planning your health checks, but that’s not the case. Through my own mistakes in the early days of working with web farms I’ve come to the realization that you shouldn’t test your database server, web service calls or other external dependencies with the health checks. Instead you should only test the web server, app pool and site. This video answers why to this question, and more.

This is now the 10th week in a mini-series on web farms, and the 34th week of the entire series. You can view past and future weeks in the section below.

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About Scott Forsyth

Senior Systems Engineer at ORCS Web, Inc (www.orcsweb.com) and co-founder of Vaasnet (www.vaasnet.com). Microsoft MVP for IIS. ASPInsider. Strengths are IIS, ASP.NET, DNS, Windows Server, and Hyper-V. This author has published 50 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.