How to set a health check on my single VM on GCP?

Question

I've created a health check, but it seems that it's not being applied to my VM instance. I read the documentation, must I use load balancing first?

Answer 1

The health checks in the linked documentation are specifically for Load Balancing.

However, it is possible to set up health checks for managed instance groups (without Load Balancing) so if your Compute Engine instance is part of a managed instance group, then you can add a health check.

If a health check detects that a service has failed on an instance, the group will automatically re-create the instance.

You can find detailed information on these instance group health checks here.