• Basic Mode: Wraps Argo health check functionality. Does not distinguish between health and status, lastUpdated and ready are not supported

  • health: One of healthy, unhealthy, warning, unknown
  • message: A reason for the status e.g. Back-off pulling image "nginx:invalid"

• Enhanced Mode: returns the following fields:

  • ready: Whether the resource is currently being reconciled / provisioned.

  ready is independent of health, e.g. A pod in a failure state can be ready if its state is terminal and will not change.

  • health: One of healthy, unhealthy, warning, unknown,

  health can transition based on the age or last event time of a resource.

  • status: A text description of the state of of resource e.g. Running or ImagePullBackoff
  • message: A reason for the status e.g. Back-off pulling image "nginx:invalid"
  • lastUpdated: The last time the resource was updated

• Heuristic Mode: Attempts to determine health using and fields named state, status etc..

kubectl po  -o json <pod-name> | is-healthy -j

Output:

{
  "ready": false,
  "health": "unhealthy",
  "status": "ImagePullBackOff",
  "message": "Back-off pulling image \"nginx:invalid\"",
  "lastUpdated": "2025-03-26T10:17:18Z"
}

This project builds upon the health check implementations from:

• Argo CD
• gitops-engine