The LoadMaster provides a robust set of pre-defined health checks for many TCP-based applications as described elsewhere in this document. When you have an application in your infrastructure for which there is no pre-defined health check, or if you want to perform content verification for any protocol, a binary health check can be created that performs this task.

Note: Binary Data health checks use HTTP (not HTTPS).

For example, you have a custom application in your configuration and that application provides health status on a particular port on the server on which it is running. It may return something as simple as an integer or it may return something more complex, like several thousand bytes of text. In either case, you can construct a binary health check that will:

Connect to the server on the appropriate port for the status program.

Send a string to the server (if required) to trigger the return of the status information.

Search the server response for a specified string that indicates that the service is up.

Mark the server up or down, as appropriate.