Java web application health check good practices

Question

I have a Java web app running (with Spring) and I wish to have a health check performed every few minutes. I'm not checking the Tomcat or the JVM but strictly on the application level so I have a few ideas for stuff to check.

For example:

• make a simple query to check DB sanity
• check that the environment is "production" (cause that's the only one that'll be monitored)

Basically I'm looking for other ideas and suggestions for what to check or some best practices for it.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

I'd recommend to try Metrics Framework

Solution 2

We have developed a special URL that accesses a spring mvc controller that tests various aspects of our application. You just need to return a 500 if your find anything wrong and give that url link to your favorite monitoring tool. We use both pingdom and nagios at our facility.

https://www.pingdom.com/

http://nagios.org/