gitpod/components/ee/cerc

Cerc

Cerc (circle in Romanian) monitors services by calling an HTTP endpoint with a token expecting to receive that token back within a certain amount of time. Compared to regularly polling some health probe HTTP endpoint this method allows going full-circle: trigger some action which is answered by the some token.

Quickstart

$ cerc <config.json>

Cercs default config contains three pathways:

• selftest-positive which runs against itself and should always succeed. This pathway is self-triggered every 10 seconds. You should see corresponding log output.
• selftest-fails which runs against itself but is designed to fail. This pathway is externally triggered, e.g. using curl localhost:8080/trigger/selftest-fails.
• selftest-resp-timeout runs against cerc itself so that cerc can answer too late. This pathway is externally triggered, e.g. using curl localhost:8080/trigger/selftest-resp-timeout.

Configuration

cerc is configured using a single JSON config file. See examples/selftest.json for an example.

How to respond to a cerc request?

cerc sends two headers when making a request to an endpoint:

• X-Cerc-ResponseURL contains the URL to which cerc exepects a POST request as answer to its request,
• X-Cerc-Token is the Bearer token one needs to send with the answer request, i.e. Authorization: Bearer <token>.