Start your 30 day free trial.
START FOR FREE

Intelligent Health Checks - AWS

Supported platforms:

N/A

Gremlin supports Intelligent Health Checks for AWS services. When enabled, Gremlin automatically creates a set of Health Checks for your AWS service, monitors key metrics (request rate, throughput, and latency), and sets error thresholds using the service’s baseline performance. This lets you create Health Checks and start testing services without needing an observability tool.

How it works

Gremlin uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your service in real time. To do this, you must first map your service to an Application Load Balancer (ALB) or Classic Load Balancer. Gremlin will use the load balancer's metrics as an indicator of service health while running tests.

Important
AWS Intelligent Health Checks require either an Application Load Balancer (ALB) or a Classic Load Balancer. Intelligent Health Checks baseline your service's health using application-level CloudWatch metrics: TargetResponseTime on ALBs and Latency on Classic Load Balancers. Network Load Balancers (NLBs) operate at layer 4 and publish only flow and connection metrics, with no request latency metric available to baseline. Because of this, NLBs and Gateway Load Balancers (GWLBs) are not supported and will not appear in the load balancer selection list.

Enabling AWS Intelligent Health Checks

To enable AWS Intelligent Health Checks:

  1. In the Gremlin web app, navigate to the service you want to enable Health Checks for.
  2. Select Settings, then Health Checks.
  3. Under Intelligent Health Checks, click on the Type drop-down menu and select AWS. Then, click + Add.
  4. Select the AWS account where your service's Application or Classic Load Balancer is deployed. If you haven't yet authenticated with AWS, follow the steps in Adding an AWS account in our AWS integration guide. Then, click Next.
  5. Select the load balancer that you want to map to this service. Gremlin will use the selected load balancer's CloudWatch metrics as an indicator of service health. If Gremlin detects unusual changes in the load balancer's throughput, latency, or error rate, it will halt the test running on the service and revert the impact. Once you've selected a load balancer, click Next.
  6. Click the checkbox next to Use Intelligent Health Checks for this service and click Save.

Disabling AWS Intelligent Health Checks

To disable Intelligent Health Checks for an AWS service:

  1. Navigate to the service you want to disable Intelligent Health Checks for.
  2. Select Settings > Health Checks.
  3. Under Intelligent Health Checks, click the Delete button next to one of the Intelligent Health Checks you want to disable. Gremlin will delete the other two Health Checks associated with the one you selected.
  4. Uncheck the checkbox next to the application that you no longer want to monitor.
  5. Click Submit.
Note
If you disable Intelligent Health Checks, make sure the service has at least one other Health Check enabled. As a safety precaution, Gremlin will not run tests on services that have no Health Checks.

On this page
Back to top