Health Checks

Google monitors deployed Actions to verify they're available and responding to user requests.

Each Action's endpoint is required to respond to a default, no parameter invocation. This supports the scenario where the user asks to talk to an Action without providing any additional information (for example, "I want to talk to invocation name").

Common questions

Do I need to implement anything specific to support the health checks?

No. Action health checks will function like a standard request to talk to an Action.

How often is my Action's health checked?

Your Action may be monitored throughout the day.

How can I detect that a request is a health check?

If you're using Actions Builder as your development platform, you receive a health check request similar to the snippet below:

{
  "handler": {
    "name": "actions.handler.HEALTH_CHECK"
  },
  "intent": {
    "name": "actions.intent.HEALTH_CHECK"
  },
  "session": {
    "id": "actions.session.HEALTH_CHECK"
  },
  "user": {
    "locale":"en-US"
  },
  "device": {
    "capabilities": []
  }
}
  

When you receive this request, you should respond with a 200 response code; otherwise, your Action is considered unhealthy. The following snippet is an example of a properly formatted response:

  {"prompt":{"override":true,"firstSimple":{"speech":"ok","text":""}}}

If you're using Dialogflow as your development platform, Google adds an "is_health_check" argument and passes this to the intent. This argument is found in the Input object of the webhook request:

{
  ...
  "originalDetectIntentRequest": {
    ...
    "payload": {
      ...
      "inputs": [{
        ...
        "arguments": [{
          "name": "is_health_check",
          "boolValue": true,
          "textValue": "1"
        }]
      }],
      ...
    }
  }
}
  

What happens if Google detects an unhealthy Action? If Google detects that the Action is experiencing an outage, the Action is suspended. Users requesting the unhealthy Action will hear "ACTION_NAME is not available".

How will I be notified if an Action is marked as unhealthy? When Google detects an unhealthy Action, we send a notification email to the primary developer associated with the Actions project.

What happens if my Action that uses account linking is marked as unhealthy? Unlike other Actions, Actions that use account linking are not suspended after Google declares them unhealthy. Users can still access your Action for 7 days after you receive the notification email. However, if you have not fixed the account linking issue after 7 days, your Action will be taken down.

How can I check my Action's health status? You can check your developer console and see the status of your Action. Unhealthy Actions will have a status of Unhealthy. Healthy Actions will be marked as Deployed.

What's the process for returning an Action to the deployed state? You should review your deployment and address any issues that might be causing the Action to fail to respond to a launch intent.

Google will continue to periodically monitor the Action's health while it is unhealthy. When Google detects that the Action is responding as expected, the Action will return to the deployed state.