How do you implement health checks and monitoring in Kubernetes applications?

Kubernetes provides multiple health check mechanisms to ensure application reliability and enable automated recovery.\n\nHealth Check Types:\n• Liveness Probe: Determines if container should be restarted\n• Readiness Probe: Determines if pod should receive traffic\n• Startup Probe: Handles slow-starting containers\n\nProbe Methods:\n• HTTP GET: Check HTTP endpoint status\n• TCP Socket: Verify port connectivity\n• Exec: Run command inside container\n\nProbe Configuration:\n• initialDelaySeconds: Wait before first probe\n• periodSeconds: Probe frequency\n• timeoutSeconds: Probe timeout\n• failureThreshold: Failures before action\n• successThreshold: Successes to recover\n\nExample:\nlivenessProbe:\n httpGet:\n path: /health\n port: 8080\n initialDelaySeconds: 30\n periodSeconds: 10\nreadinessProbe:\n httpGet:\n path: /ready\n port: 8080\n initialDelaySeconds: 5\n periodSeconds: 5\n\nMonitoring Stack:\n• Prometheus: Metrics collection\n• Grafana: Visualization\n• AlertManager: Alert routing\n• Jaeger: Distributed tracing\n\nBest Practices:\n• Implement all three probe types\n• Use different endpoints for different probes\n• Set appropriate timeouts and thresholds\n• Monitor probe success rates\n• Implement custom metrics