Google App Engine health checks spamming app

Unfortunately it does seem like we have a bug on our docs. Today, indeed, apps do get health checked on a pretty frequent basis.

The reason is many fold, but in general each VM will be hit by 3 * 2 different health checks at the recurrence interval you specify (by default, the, very aggressive, 1 sec). The reason for this is 2 types of health check (autohealer and LB ones) and 3 of each for availability reasons.

That being said, we are currently working on a new shape of health checks that will be released pretty soon and should fix this and other problems with the existing health checking behavior (at least make the defaults more manageable and giving more tuning options to users).

Stay tuned!

I also run NodeJS in GAE Flex env. Health checks were also spamming the server log. The following few things helped me in reducing them:

1. Although the google documentation (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/configuring-your-app-with-app-yaml#health_checks) says healthcheck config is not required, I set them explicity anyway to lower the frequency of the health check calls.
2. Use the "Advanced Log Filter" to remove the health check logging from showing up if they are too distracting.
3. Google documentation (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/how-instances-are-managed) says it's not required to implement a handler for health check, I explicitly implemented it anyway. I added a handler for "/_ah/healthcheck" endpoint in the express.js server, and have the route at the top of app.js file, so the healthcheck requests are responded right away. This helped reduce some noises caused by the health check requests getting into the express app logic.

I don't have a solution to the root problem. But if the spamming is making it impossible to use the log for its intended purpose, like it is for me, here is a work around:

1. Enable the 'Advanced Log Filters' (the tiny down arrow next to the search field in Stackdriver Logging)

2. Add this to the Search query

   NOT textPayload : (health)