How would you design health checks for a .NET API running on Azure App Service?

How would you design health checks for an App Service-hosted .NET API?

Explains health endpoints, readiness versus liveness, warm-up, dependency checks, and safe App Service health behavior.

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I would separate liveness, readiness, and release smoke checks. A liveness check can be very small and answer whether the process is alive. A readiness check can verify critical configuration and a small set of required dependencies. I would avoid one expensive endpoint that calls every downstream service on every probe, because that can turn a short dependency blip into restarts and extra load.

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Health endpoint design, dependency boundaries, readiness, liveness, warm-up, deployment verification, and avoiding noisy checks.

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Why this question matters
Liveness, readiness, slot warm-up, release smoke checks, and business verification answer different operational questions. Combining them into one expensive probe can turn a dependency problem into unnecessary restarts and extra load.
I would separate liveness, readiness, and release smoke checks. A liveness check can be very small and answer whether the process is alive. A readiness check can verify critical configuration and a small set of required dependencies. I would avoid one expensive endpoint that calls every downstream service on every probe, because that can turn a short dependency blip into restarts and extra load.
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For App Service I would expose a stable health endpoint, keep it fast, add timeouts, and return safe failure reasons without leaking secrets. Readiness can fail when required configuration, database connectivity, or a critical dependency is unavailable, while liveness remains focused on the web process. For releases I would use separate warm-up and smoke checks against a staging slot before swap, then monitor real request failures after the swap. That keeps platform health, release validation, and business verification from fighting each other.

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Using one endpoint for liveness, readiness, and business smoke tests.
Calling slow dependencies on every probe.
Leaking configuration details in health responses.
Treating restarts as the default answer to dependency outages.

How would you design health checks for a .NET API running on Azure App Service?

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