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!