About machine health checks

You can use machine health checks to detect and remediate unhealthy machines automatically, limiting disruption to the targeted machine pool.

Note

You can only apply a machine health check to machines that are managed by compute machine sets or control plane machine sets.

To monitor machine health, create a resource to define the configuration for a controller. Set a condition to check, such as staying in the NotReady status for five minutes or displaying a permanent condition in the node-problem-detector, and a label for the set of machines to monitor.

The controller that observes a MachineHealthCheck resource checks for the defined condition. If a machine fails the health check, the machine is automatically deleted and one is created to take its place. When a machine is deleted, you see a machine deleted event.

To limit disruptive impact of the machine deletion, the controller drains and deletes only one node at a time. If there are more unhealthy machines than the maxUnhealthy threshold allows for in the targeted pool of machines, remediation stops and therefore enables manual intervention.

Note

Consider the timeouts carefully, accounting for workloads and requirements.

  • Long timeouts can result in long periods of downtime for the workload on the unhealthy machine.

  • Too short timeouts can result in a remediation loop. For example, the timeout for checking the NotReady status must be long enough to allow the machine to complete the startup process.

To stop the check, remove the resource.