Support the GRPC Health protocol

[poolski]

While trying to implement service discovery for Thanos components using Consul, we've run into an issue where we're unable to healthcheck Thanos using gRPC because it doesn't support the standard gRPC health protocol. (grpc.health.v1.Health) which would allow load balancers and the like to be able to run gRPC healthchecks successfully.

Is this something which is on the radar for future releases?

[kakkoyun]

Hey, I have worked on HTTP health checks, happy to work on this as well.
As far as I can tell from the documentation, it's not very hard to achieve.

https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/health-checking.md
https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/src/proto/grpc/health/v1/health.proto
https://godoc.org/google.golang.org/grpc/health/grpc_health_v1

Maintainers can assign this one to me if they don't have any objection.

[bwplotka]

It's the first time we hear such use case (: But we can definitely discuss how we can unblock you.

@kakkoyun well let's first decide if it's required (:

Some initial thoughts:

• We hold our healthchecks via HTTP endpoints like /~/healthy as standard way Kubernetes expects
• Querier checks health via Info gRPC method since this gives up-to-date metadata.

None of this is sufficient for your case @poolski ?

[poolski]

@bwplotka @kakkoyun, thank you for replying! 🙇
Sorry, I've been away from work over the weekend

We've found that tools like Envoy and Consul which support gRPC proxying and service discovery (respectively) rely on the grpc.health.v1.Health endpoint being available as most gRPC services can be reasonably expected to implement that endpoint.

I can see the benefit of using Info for more detailed service information, but this would require additional configuration on the downstream end (Envoy/Consul/), which is sometimes not supported or is tricky to implement.

Using a standard health gRPC healthcheck endpoint can mean that folks can test the availability of the Thanos service much easier, since the service health information resides at a predictable location.

I understand that you don't natively integrate with Consul as a service discovery mechanism per se at present, which makes sense, but given that Consul can treat Thanos as a generic gRPC service without any special requirements, having the Health endpoint available seems like an easy win.

[poolski]

Hey folks,

Any thoughts so far? :)

[kakkoyun]

@poolski I went ahead and have created a PR #2008 for this.
If maintainers decide to go ahead, it could be reviewed and merged.

@bwplotka @metalmatze @squat