Monitoring

HELIX includes health monitoring tools to ensure your services are running correctly and to alert you when issues arise.

Health Checks

Each Docker service has a built-in health check:

Service	Health Check	Interval
PostgreSQL	pg_isready	10s
Redis	redis-cli ping	10s
Backend	GET /api/health	30s
Frontend	GET /	30s
Gateway	WebSocket connectivity test	30s

Docker automatically restarts unhealthy containers based on these checks.

Service Status

Via CLI

# Check all service status
helix status

# Example output:
# Service          Status     Health
# ─────────────────────────────────────
# helix-db         running    healthy
# helix-redis      running    healthy
# helix-gateway    running    healthy
# helix-backend    running    healthy
# helix-frontend   running    healthy
# helix-caddy      running    healthy

Via Docker

# Container status with health
docker compose ps

# Detailed health info for a service
docker inspect --format='{{json .State.Health}}' helix-backend

Via API

# Backend health endpoint
curl https://helix.example.com/api/health

Logs

View Logs

# All services
helix logs

# Specific service
helix logs backend
helix logs gateway
helix logs frontend

# Or via Docker
docker compose logs -f backend
docker compose logs -f gateway --tail=100

Log Locations

Service	Log Access
Backend	docker compose logs backend
Frontend	docker compose logs frontend
Gateway	docker compose logs gateway
PostgreSQL	docker compose logs db
Redis	docker compose logs redis
Caddy	docker compose logs caddy
Systemd	journalctl -u helix-mission-control

Log Levels

Set the log level in .env:

LOG_LEVEL=info    # Options: debug, info, warning, error

Use debug for troubleshooting, info for normal operation.

Health Check Script

HELIX includes a comprehensive health check script:

bash scripts/health-check.sh

This script checks:

1. Docker — is Docker running?
2. Containers — are all containers up and healthy?
3. Database — can we connect and query?
4. Redis — is Redis responding?
5. Backend API — does /api/health return 200?
6. Frontend — is the web UI accessible?
7. Gateway — is the WebSocket connection established?
8. Disk space — is there sufficient disk remaining?
9. Memory — is memory usage acceptable?

Automated Health Monitoring

Set up periodic health checks with alerts:

bash scripts/setup-health-cron.sh

This creates a cron job that runs the health check every 5 minutes and sends Telegram alerts if any service is unhealthy.

Auto-Restart

HELIX services are configured with Docker restart policies:

restart: unless-stopped

If a container crashes, Docker automatically restarts it. Combined with health checks, this provides self-healing for transient failures.

The systemd service ensures HELIX starts on server boot:

sudo systemctl enable helix-mission-control

Monitoring Checklist

For production deployments, regularly check:

• [ ] All containers show healthy status
• [ ] Gateway shows Connected in the dashboard
• [ ] Disk space is above 20% free
• [ ] Backup cron is running (check latest backup timestamp)
• [ ] No error-level entries in recent logs
• [ ] SSL certificate is valid and not expiring soon