Health Check Response Format for HTTP APIs

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

The vast majority of modern APIs driving data to web and mobile applications use HTTP [RFC7230] as their protocol. The health and uptime of these APIs determine availability of the applications themselves. In distributed systems built with a number of APIs, understanding the health status of the APIs and making corresponding decisions, for caching, failover or circuit-breaking, are essential to the ability of providing highly-available solutions.¶

There exists a wide variety of operational software that relies on the ability to read health check response of APIs. However, there is currently no standard for the health check output response, so most applications either rely on the basic level of information included in HTTP status codes [RFC7231] or use task-specific formats.¶

Usage of task-specific or application-specific formats creates significant challenges, disallowing any meaningful interoperability across different implementations and between different tooling.¶

Standardizing a format for health checks can provide any of a number of benefits, including:¶

• Flexible deployment - since operational tooling and API clients can rely on rich, uniform format, they can be safely combined and substituted as needed.¶
• Evolvability - new APIs, conforming to the standard, can safely be introduced in any environment and ecosystem that also conforms to the same standard, without costly coordination and testing requirements.¶

This document defines a "health check" format using the JSON format [RFC8259] for APIs to use as a standard point for the health information they offer. Having a well-defined format for this purpose promotes good practice and tooling.¶

2. Notational Conventions

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].¶

3. API Health Response

Health Check Response Format for HTTP APIs uses the JSON format described in [RFC8259] and has the media type "application/health+json".¶

Its content consists of a single mandatory root field ("status") and several optional fields:¶

4. The Checks Object

The "checks" object MAY have a number of unique keys, one for each logical downstream dependency or sub-component. Since each sub-component may be backed by several nodes with varying health statuses, these keys point to arrays of objects. In case of a single-node sub-component (or if presence of nodes is not relevant), a single-element array SHOULD be used as the value, for consistency.¶

The key identifying an element in the object SHOULD be a unique string within the details section. It MAY have two parts: "{componentName}:{measurementName}", in which case the meaning of the parts SHOULD be as follows:¶

• componentName: (optional) human-readable name for the component. MUST not contain a colon, in the name, since colon is used as a separator.¶

• measurementName: (optional) name of the measurement type (a data point type) that the status is reported for. MUST not contain a colon, in the name, since colon is used as a separator. The observation's name can be one of:¶

  • A pre-defined value from this spec. Pre-defined values include:¶

    • utilization¶
    • responseTime¶
    • connections¶
    • uptime¶
  • A common and standard term from a well-known source such as schema.org, IANA or microformats.¶
  • A URI that indicates extra semantics and processing rules that MAY be provided by a resource at the other end of the URI. URIs do not have to be dereferenceable, however. They are just a namespace, and the meaning of a namespace CAN be provided by any convenient means (e.g. publishing an RFC, Open API Spec document or a nicely printed book).¶

On the value side of the equation, each "component details" object in the array SHOULD have at least one key, and MAY have any or none of the following object keys:¶

5. Example Output

  GET /health HTTP/1.1
  Host: example.org
  Accept: application/health+json

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Type: application/health+json
  Cache-Control: max-age=3600
  Connection: close

{
  "status": "pass",
  "version": "1",
  "releaseId": "1.2.2",
  "notes": [""],
  "output": "",
  "serviceId": "f03e522f-1f44-4062-9b55-9587f91c9c41",
  "description": "health of authz service",
  "checks": {
    "cassandra:responseTime": [
      {
        "componentId": "dfd6cf2b-1b6e-4412-a0b8-f6f7797a60d2",
        "componentType": "datastore",
        "observedValue": 250,
        "observedUnit": "ms",
        "status": "pass",
        "affectedEndpoints" : [
          "/users/{userId}",
          "/customers/{customerId}/status",
          "/shopping/{anything}"
        ],
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": ""
      }
    ],
    "cassandra:connections": [
      {
        "componentId": "dfd6cf2b-1b6e-4412-a0b8-f6f7797a60d2",
        "componentType": "datastore",
        "observedValue": 75,
        "status": "warn",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": "",
        "links": {
          "self": "http://api.example.com/dbnode/dfd6cf2b/health"
        }
      }
    ],
    "uptime": [
      {
        "componentType": "system",
        "observedValue": 1209600.245,
        "observedUnit": "s",
        "status": "pass",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z"
      }
    ],
    "cpu:utilization": [
      {
        "componentId": "6fd416e0-8920-410f-9c7b-c479000f7227",
        "node": 1,
        "componentType": "system",
        "observedValue": 85,
        "observedUnit": "percent",
        "status": "warn",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": ""
      },
      {
        "componentId": "6fd416e0-8920-410f-9c7b-c479000f7227",
        "node": 2,
        "componentType": "system",
        "observedValue": 85,
        "observedUnit": "percent",
        "status": "warn",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": ""
      }
    ],
    "memory:utilization": [
      {
        "componentId": "6fd416e0-8920-410f-9c7b-c479000f7227",
        "node": 1,
        "componentType": "system",
        "observedValue": 8.5,
        "observedUnit": "GiB",
        "status": "warn",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": ""
      },
      {
        "componentId": "6fd416e0-8920-410f-9c7b-c479000f7227",
        "node": 2,
        "componentType": "system",
        "observedValue": 5500,
        "observedUnit": "MiB",
        "status": "pass",
        "time": "2018-01-17T03:36:48Z",
        "output": ""
      }
    ]
  },
  "links": {
    "about": "http://api.example.com/about/authz",
    "http://api.x.io/rel/thresholds":
      "http://api.x.io/about/authz/thresholds"
  }
}

6. Security Considerations

Clients need to exercise care when reporting health information. Malicious actors could use this information for orchestrating attacks. In some cases, the health check endpoints may need to be authenticated and institute role-based access control.¶

7. IANA Considerations

The media type for health check response is application/health+json.¶

• Media type name: application¶
• Media subtype name: health+json¶
• Required parameters: n/a¶
• Optional parameters: n/a¶
• Encoding considerations: binary¶

• Security considerations: Health+JSON shares security issues common to all JSON content types. See RFC 8259 Section #12 for additional information.¶

  Health+JSON allows utilization of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and as such shares security issues common to URI usage. See RFC 3986 Section #7 for additional information.¶

  Since health+json can carry wide variety of data, some data may require privacy or integrity services. This specification does not prescribe any specific solution and assumes that concrete implementations will utilize common, trusted approaches such as TLS/HTTPS, OAuth2 etc.¶

• Interoperability considerations: None¶
• Published specification: this RFC draft¶
• Applications which use this media: Various¶
• Fragment identifier considerations: Health+JSON follows RFC6901 for implementing URI Fragment Identification standard to JSON content types.¶
• Restrictions on usage: None¶

• Additional information:¶

  1. Deprecated alias names for this type: n/a¶
  2. Magic number(s): n/a¶
  3. File extension(s): .json¶
  4. Macintosh file type code: TEXT¶
  5. Object Identifiers: n/a¶
• General Comments:¶

• Person to contact for further information:¶

  1. Name: Irakli Nadareishvili¶
  2. Email: irakli@gmail.com¶
• Intended usage: Common¶
• Author/Change controller: Irakli Nadareishvili¶

8. Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mike Amundsen, Erik Wilde, Justin Bachorik and Randall Randall for their suggestions and feedback. And to Mark Nottingham for blueprint for authoring RFCs easily.¶

9. Creating and Serving Health Responses

When making an health check endpoint available, there are a few things to keep in mind:¶

• A health response endpoint is best located at a memorable and commonly-used URI, such as "health" because it will help self-discoverability by clients.¶
• Health check responses can be personalized. For example, you could advertise different URIs, and/or different kinds of link relations, to afford different clients access to additional health check information.¶
• Health check responses SHOULD be assigned a freshness lifetime (e.g., "Cache-Control: max-age=3600") so that clients can determine how long they could cache them, to avoid overly frequent fetching and unintended DDOS-ing of the service. Any method of cache lifetime negotiation provided by HTTP spec is acceptable (e.g. ETags are just fine).¶
• Custom link relation types, as well as the URIs for variables, SHOULD lead to documentation for those constructs.¶

10. Consuming Health Check Responses

Clients might use health check responses in a variety of ways.¶

Note that the health check response is a "living" document; links from the health check response MUST NOT be assumed to be valid beyond the freshness lifetime of the health check response, as per HTTP's caching model [RFC7234].¶

As a result, clients ought to cache the health check response (as per [RFC7234]), to avoid fetching it before every interaction (which would otherwise be required).¶

Likewise, a client encountering a 404 (Not Found) on a link is encouraged to obtain a fresh copy of the health check response, to assure that it is up-to-date.¶

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