A load balancer sends a probe packet to a first server in a list of servers. Each server in the list sends the probe successively down the list of servers and acknowledges the probe if the server is healthy. The final server in the list sends a signal to the load balancer to indicate that the chain of server probing has completed successfully. In this manner, the load balancer (or other device performing the checking) only needs to send a single probe rather than probe each server in the list separately. Embodiments include serial and recursive acknowledgments from the servers, sending a beacon message upon failure, and other features.