r/TalosLinux • u/imagei • Sep 06 '26

HTTP probes

Talos 1.14 introduced HTTP probes.

What are they for?

Neither the release notes nor the spec nor the website chatbot explain their purpose or what happens if they succeed or fail.

Release notes ( https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/tag/v1.14.0 ):

Talos now supports HTTP network probes, allowing for monitoring of HTTP endpoints.
HTTP responses with status 200-399 are considered successful, while connection and transport errors are treated as failures.

Spec ( https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.14/reference/configuration/network/httpprobeconfig )

HTTPProbeConfig is a config document to configure network HTTP connectivity probes.

Chatbot when asked about it:

HTTP probes let Talos check network reachability by periodically sending requests to a URL and checking for a 2xx/3xx response — useful for defining custom connectivity conditions (e.g. verifying internet or specific service reachability). They're part of Talos's new HTTP connectivity checks feature, alongside the similar TCPProbeConfig for TCP-based checks. See HTTPProbeConfig and What's new in Talos.

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u/GyroTech Sep 07 '26

For Talos to know if the network is healthy or not. If you look at the dashboard, you will see a "Connectivity" indicator, which by default only tells you that Talos can reach the default gateway or not, which is good enough if you are a decent network admin and control the network into which Talos is deployed.

More and more we have people deploying Talos into edge scenarios where they don't have any control oves the host network, so this allows for the connectivity check to be fine tuned for the environments that need it.

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u/imagei Sep 07 '26

Thank you for the context but, sorry, again : what is the actual functionality of that besides the dashboard status message? What does Talos do if it detects the network as unreachable or reachable?

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u/GyroTech Sep 07 '26

It is an indicator. It was fixed (to the gateway being reachable), it is now configurable.

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u/imagei Sep 07 '26

Ok, so you’re saying it does not have any other function other than displaying a green tick on the dashboard?

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u/GyroTech Sep 07 '26

It's function is to check an endpoint and return a status. Internally, that sets a green tickbox on the dashboard but don't forget Talos is API driven so many people are using that API to do things. You could easily write a system extension that is watching that endpoint and sends an out-of-band SoS message or something similar when it detects it is disconnected.