Health Checks
Lightning Terminal uses Health Checks to assess the basic qualities of a routing node.
Lightning Terminal uses various health checks to assess a node’s ability to route payments through the Lightning Network. Health checks are far from perfect. They are not overly specific as they are a general measure for routing nodes, not a concrete target meant to gamify the process.
A node configured mainly for receiving or sending payments, such as the node of a merchant, might not pass the formal health checks, and a high performing routing node serving the edges of the network might earn more routing fees than one ranked higher. Health checks are just a general measure for routing nodes.
Passing your health checks and ranking high in Terminal is a measure of your ability to receive, make, and route payments in the general Lightning Network. Identifying these nodes helps entrants determine how they can most easily get connected to the wider network themselves, either through outbound or inbound liquidity.
When starting up your node, Terminal will suggest nodes you can establish channels to. These nodes are chosen from nodes that pass five of the health checks, but are in need of more good peers. By connecting to these nodes you can help your own node as well as your peer get closer to the goal of passing all health checks, while also decentralizing the network as a whole. As you adapt your personal Lightning Node to your personal needs, ideally, you will rely less and less on these recommendations and the scores of others. This transition is due to the fact that while onboarding into the Lightning Network can be prescriptive, further advancing as a routing node is more competitive and less supervised.

A node that passes four of six Health Checks
Your node has to be online. Many high performing routing nodes are able to be reachable via Tor.