# Check the health of your Network Load Balancer targets
Check target health

You can check the health status of the targets registered with your target groups. For help with health check failures, see [Troubleshooting: A registered target is not in service](load-balancer-troubleshooting.md#target-not-in-service).

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#### [ Console ]

**To check the health of your targets**

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at [https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/](https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/).

1. In the navigation pane, under **Load Balancing**, choose **Target Groups**.

1. Choose the name of the target group to open its details page.

1. The **Details** tab displays the total number of targets, plus the number of targets for each health status.

1. On the **Targets** tab, the **Health status** column indicates the status of each target.

1. If the status of a target is any value other than `Healthy`, the **Health status details** column contains more information.

**To receive email notifications about unhealthy targets**  
Use CloudWatch alarms to trigger a Lambda function to send details about unhealthy targets. For step-by-step instructions, see the following blog post: [Identifying unhealthy targets of your load balancer](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/identifying-unhealthy-targets-of-elastic-load-balancer/).

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#### [ AWS CLI ]

**To check the health of your targets**  
Use the [describe-target-health](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/elbv2/describe-target-health.html) command. This example filters the output to include only targets that are not healthy. For targets that are not healthy, the output includes a reason code.

```
aws elbv2 describe-target-health \
    --target-group-arn target-group-arn \
    --query "TargetHealthDescriptions[?TargetHealth.State!='healthy'].[Target.Id,TargetHealth.State,TargetHealth.Reason]" \
    --output table
```

The following is example output.

```
----------------------------------------------
|            DescribeTargetHealth            |
+--------------+---------+-------------------+
|  172.31.0.57 |  unused |  Target.NotInUse  |
|  172.31.0.50 |  unused |  Target.NotInUse  |
+--------------+---------+-------------------+
```

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## Target states and reason codes


The following list shows the possible reason codes for each target state.

**Target state is healthy**  
A reason code is not provided.

**Target state is initial**  
+  `Elb.RegistrationInProgress` - The target is in the process of being registered with the load balancer.
+  `Elb.InitialHealthChecking` - The load balancer is still sending the target the minimum number of health checks required to determine its health status.

**Target state is unhealthy**  
+ `Target.FailedHealthChecks` - The load balancer received an error while establishing a connection to the target or the target response was malformed.

**Target state is unused**  
+ `Target.NotRegistered` - The target is not registered with the target group.
+ `Target.NotInUse` - The target group is not used by any load balancer or the target is in an Availability Zone that is not enabled for its load balancer.
+ `Target.InvalidState` - The target is in the stopped or terminated state.
+ `Target.IpUnusable` - The target IP address is reserved for use by a load balancer.

**Target state is draining**  
+ `Target.DeregistrationInProgress` - The target is in the process of being deregistered and the deregistration delay period has not expired.

**Target state is unavailable**  
+ `Elb.InternalError` - Target health is unavailable due to an internal error.