haproxy_backend_status

Alerts
1

haproxy_backend_status

Web Proxy | HAProxy

HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for very high traffic web sites and powers a significant portion of the world’s most visited ones. Over the years it has become the de-facto standard opensource load balancer, is now shipped with most mainstream Linux distributions, and is often deployed by default in cloud platforms. 1

The Netdata Agent monitors the average number of failed HAProxy backends over the last 10 seconds.
Receiving this alert (in critical state) means that one or more HAProxy backend are inaccessible or
offline.

HA Proxy Backends

A HA proxy backend is a set of servers that receives forwarded requests. Backends are defined in
the backend section of the HAProxy configuration. In its most basic form, a backend can be defined by:

  • which load balance algorithm to use

  • a list of servers and ports

A backend can contain one or many servers in it–generally speaking, adding more servers to your
backend will increase your potential load capacity by spreading the load over multiple servers.
Increase reliability is also achieved through this manner, in case some of your backend servers
become unavailable. 2

References and Sources
  1. The Four Essential Sections of an HAProxy Configuration
  2. HA proxy explained in DigitalOcean

Troubleshooting Section

Check the HA proxy's configuration file for errors

Making changes in the configuration file may introduce errors. Make sure your always validate the
correctness of the configuration file.

  1. In most Linux distros you can run the following check:
root@netadata # haproxy -c -f /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
Check the HA proxy service for errors
  1. Use journalctl and inspect the log:
root@netdata # journalctl -u haproxy.service  --reverse
Check the HA proxy's log
  1. By default HA proxy logs under /var/log/haproxy.log:
root@netdata # cat /var/log/haproxy.log | grep 'emerg\|alert\|crit\|err\|warning\|notice'

You can also search for log messages with info and debug tags.