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/api/health

Primary health endpoint. Checks all Redis-backed data keys and seed freshness metadata in a single pipeline call. Authentication: Compact health (?compact=1) is public for uptime and keyword monitors. Detailed health (/api/health without compact=1) and the operator history view (?history=1) require a valid operator/enterprise API key because they expose canonical Redis key names, record counts, and freshness thresholds. Browser origins must still pass the CORS allowlist in api/_cors.js; requests with no Origin header, such as server-side monitors, are allowed only for compact health unless they include an operator key. Health responses are never cached (Cache-Control: private, no-store, max-age=0 and CDN-Cache-Control: no-store). HTTP Method: GET

Query Parameters

Response Status Codes

The overall health verdict lives in the JSON status field, not the HTTP code. Every state except REDIS_DOWN returns 200 so warn-level seed jitter doesn’t flap HTTP-status monitors (see PR #2699). REDIS_DOWN returns 503 because with Redis unreachable the endpoint can assess nothing, so a plain HTTP probe must see a failure.

Response Body

summary fields: total is one entry per probed key (currently ~194 and growing as panels are added). warn excludes on-demand-empty keys — those are surfaced separately as onDemandWarn so they don’t drive the overall verdict to WARNING. staleContent is a subset of warn (fresh seeder but the upstream feed stopped advancing). Only crit (EMPTY/EMPTY_DATA) drives DEGRADED/UNHEALTHY. With ?compact=1, the checks object is replaced by problems containing only non-OK keys.

Key Classifications

Keys are grouped into three tiers that determine alert severity:

Per-Key Statuses

China Coverage Projection

chinaCoverage projects the hourly Railway summary at health:china-coverage:v1. The evaluator checks each launched China contract for both a fresh producer heartbeat and fresh, substantive China content; a fresh seed cannot hide stale or missing source content. CHINA_DEGRADED is a warning projection for partial or stale coverage, while CHINA_UNAVAILABLE is critical when the summary is invalid or the launched content is unavailable. The final public composition is monitored separately as chinaDecisionSignals. Its canonical payload must contain all six stable groups even when individual groups are explicitly unavailable. Health requires six group records and a seed no older than 60 minutes. Per-source transport details for policy, exchanges, and cross-Strait publishers remain visible only in this authenticated operator view; they are not copied into the public country summary or Pro MCP result. Blocked China contracts remain visible in the audit with their stable reason code but are excluded from the strict launched-entry health count. The launched cross-Strait activity contract audits the durable archive military:cross-strait-activity:v1 independently for producer transport and latest Taiwan MND reporting-window freshness. A fresh seed with a stale official report therefore remains degraded. Japan Joint Staff reviewed observations are regional augmentation and do not satisfy the Taiwan MND content requirement. /api/health separately monitors military:cross-strait-activity-bootstrap:v1; fresh canonical data cannot hide a missing compact UI projection. It also exposes dedicated MND and Japan Joint Staff transport records; either source reports SEED_ERROR immediately when its current fetch fails, while the last-good archive remains available. The bundle freshness gate advances only after the archive, projection, and both source-health records publish successfully. Operators can obtain the same sanitized, read-only audit with node scripts/audit-china-coverage.mjs --json; add --strict to return a nonzero exit code unless every launched entry is healthy. The audit reads only the compact Redis contracts and emits status, age, and reason-code summaries— never credentials or raw upstream payloads.

Cascade Groups

Some keys use fallback chains. If any sibling has data, empty siblings report OK_CASCADE:
  • Theater Posture: theaterPostureLive -> theaterPosture (stale) -> theaterPostureBackup
  • Military Flights: militaryFlights -> militaryFlightsStale
  • Displacement: displacement (current UTC year) -> displacementPrev (prior year, covers the Jan-1 window before the new-year seed runs)
riskScores is intentionally stricter than a raw feed heartbeat. Its recordCount is realtime signal-density coverage: the count of score-relevant Tier-1 conflict, news, and cyber signal families present during the CII refresh. The conflict family is satisfied by either the ACLED path or the UCDP event feed, matching the CII v8 scorer. When those feeds are reachable but quiet, riskScores can still report COVERAGE_PARTIAL; underlying feed freshness is tracked by the source-specific health entries where those feeds publish seed metadata. portwatchPortActivity also uses minRecordCount. A fresh seed-meta:supply_chain:portwatch-ports record below 174 countries reports COVERAGE_PARTIAL instead of OK; partial runs may still refresh per-country PortWatch cache entries, but the canonical country list and healthy seed-meta signal do not advance until full 174-country coverage returns.

Staleness Thresholds (maxStaleMin)

Selected thresholds from SEED_META:
These are illustrative; SEED_META in api/health.js is the source of truth and each entry documents its own cadence rationale.

Example Requests

/api/seed-health

Focused endpoint for seed loop freshness. Checks only seed-meta:* keys without fetching actual data payloads. Authentication: Requires valid API key or allowed origin. HTTP Method: GET

Response Status Codes

Response Body

Staleness Logic

A seed is considered stale when its age exceeds 2x the configured interval. This accounts for normal jitter in cron/relay timing. Seeds with an explicit minRecordCount also report coverage_partial and stale: true until their coverage floor is met.

Example Request

Integration with Monitoring Tools

UptimeRobot

Use /api/health?compact=1 as the public monitor URL. The HTTP status code only distinguishes a total Redis outage from everything else:
  • 503 = REDIS_DOWN (Redis unreachable — a true hard outage)
  • 200 = every other state, including DEGRADED and UNHEALTHY
So an HTTP-status-only monitor catches a full backend outage but not degraded/unhealthy data. For those, add a keyword monitor. Point the keyword monitor at https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health?compact=1 and alert when the compact token "status":"HEALTHY" (no space after the colon) is absent from the response body. Compact mode serializes with no indentation, so this exact token is stable regardless of formatting.
The bare /api/health URL is now an operator view and returns 401 without an API key. Public monitoring should always use ?compact=1.

Custom Alerting

Parse the JSON response to build granular alerts:

Differences Between Endpoints