Benjamin Cane • 5/22/2026

Health-check the listener your gRPC traffic actually uses

This article discusses a common pitfall when adopting gRPC: health-checking the HTTP listener instead of the gRPC listener that actually serves production traffic. It explains the problem of running dual listeners (HTTP for metrics and gRPC for traffic) and how misleading HTTP health checks can be. The article provides three better monitoring strategies: using a real gRPC health probe, building a custom status gRPC service, or using a single shared listener. It emphasizes the importance of revisiting configurations inherited from REST services to ensure production readiness.

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#Grpc #Kubernetes #Health Checks