Monitoring available Diffusion servers from your load balancer

To route your client connections most effectively, your load balancer must know which Diffusion™ servers are available to accept connections.

There are a number of ways to determine the availability of a Diffusion server:

Implement a custom monitor using a scripting language that is supported by your load balancer.
For example, create a custom Diffusion client that connects and subscribes to a status topic.

This is the most effective way of determine availability as can check the connector used by your client applications.
Use an HTTP probe against the built-in web server.
This has the advantage of being simple; most system administrators are familiar with HTTP requests. In the simplest case, a GET request can be made against the root context of the web server, for example:
```
GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n
```
However, this only tests the availability of the Diffusion server as a whole, and not the applications within it.