How can I health check probe an Azure Search service without using Azure Traffic manager?

Question

I am using Azure Search and have search services set up in multiple regions for high availability. I would like to poll/probe the health of the services using an external load balancer to ensure that I am serving only healthy instances. What is the best way to do this with Azure Search? Is there a URL endpoint that I can poll for this?

I see in this article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-performance-optimization that Azure Traffic Manager can be set up to probe the search services, is there a way I can probe them without using this?

Answer 1

You could create a canary index with no documents and query it periodically; that should successfully return zero documents every time.