Embodiments of the present disclosure disclose a method and apparatus for outputting information. A specific embodiment of the method comprises: connecting a database, in response to receiving a request for detecting the database; performing a write operation on a heartbeat table in the database, in response to detecting the connection with the database being normal; performing a read operation on the heartbeat table in the database, in response to detecting the write operation for the heartbeat table being abnormal; performing on the database an operation of writing a file to a hard disk, in response to detecting the read operation on the heartbeat table being normal; and outputting first information for representing a cause of a database failure, in response to detecting the operation of writing the file to the hard disk being abnormal. This embodiment improves the accuracy of the detection on the database failure.