Replication Cluster Monitoring

Hi All,

Please bear with me as I'm not a dba and I'm new to Postgres. I'm writing a Java application to monitor a streaming replication cluster (Windows). I want to monitor the Master and initiate failover if necessary (something like a scaled down version of pgpool). I also want to monitor the standby and terminate synchronous replication in the event of a failure. At this point, my app is polling the Master every N seconds and triggering a failover if the wait is too long or it receives a connection error. I'm worried that this method of assessing server health could lead to false-failovers. Any suggestions as to specific health checks I could run or issues I should watch out for? Thanks!

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