A 200 OK tells you that one HTTP request received a response the monitor considers successful. It does not prove the response showed the right page, that the site works for every visitor, or that a key action such as signing in or searching succeeds. The gap is usually in what the monitor checks: its URL, accepted status codes, response-content rules, or the meaning of the site’s health endpoint.
What a green 200 check actually proves
A status-only check answers a narrow question: did this particular request receive an HTTP status code the monitor accepts? For example, Amazon Route 53’s basic HTTP and HTTPS health checks treat responses in the 2xx or 3xx range as healthy. That acceptance rule does not establish that the response is useful or that another page or service works. See AWS’s explanation of how Route 53 determines endpoint health.
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A site can therefore return 200 with an error page, an empty or outdated page, or a fallback route. A redirect can also lead somewhere other than the expected destination. These are possibilities to investigate, not evidence that any one cause is especially common.
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Compare the monitor’s request with the failing visitor’s request. Check the hostname, path, HTTP method, headers, and redirect handling. A check of the home page is not a check of checkout, login, search, or a particular API operation. Likewise, a browser and a monitor may make different requests, so reproduce the configured probe rather than assuming they see the same response.
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Inspect DNS resolution, TLS behavior, the initial and final URL, status code, response headers and body, and response time. Look for an authentication redirect, maintenance response, branded error page, stale cache, missing content, or unexpected fallback. The goal is to confirm whether the response is the one the monitor was meant to validate.
How to diagnose and fix a false green
- Reproduce the configured probe. Request the same hostname and path with the same method, headers, and redirect policy. Record DNS and TLS results, the response code, final URL, body, and latency.
- Compare the response with the intended page or operation. Check for error or maintenance content, an unexpected redirect, empty or stale content, and fallback routing. A successful status alone cannot distinguish these outcomes.
- Test the failing user path. Exercise the affected page or API operation, including a safe read-only transaction where possible. Check the dependencies that operation actually uses; a working root URL does not demonstrate that they are healthy.
- Make health signals answer distinct questions. Use liveness to indicate whether a process is running and readiness to indicate whether it should receive traffic. Include a dependency in readiness only when its failure means the service should stop receiving traffic. Keep more detailed diagnostics separate when operators need them.
- Strengthen the external check. Add a stable response-body assertion or a synthetic browser/API transaction for a critical workflow. Choose markers that signal meaningful content but are unlikely to break after harmless copy or layout changes.
- Keep enough probe detail to diagnose alerts. Record the probe location, requested URL, final status, latency, and failure layer—DNS, connection, TLS, HTTP, or application content. Do not expose sensitive diagnostic details through a public endpoint.
Choose a check that matches the failure you need to catch
| Check | What it can establish | Main limitation | Good use |
|---|---|---|---|
| HTTP status check | The endpoint returned a status the monitor accepts. | It can accept a generic or misleading response. | Basic reachability and broad outage detection. |
| Status plus body assertion | An expected text marker appears in the response. | The marker may persist while deeper functionality is broken; matching rules may also be limited. | Detecting fallback or error content, or missing expected page content. |
| Health or readiness endpoint | The application reports a process or readiness state according to its own endpoint contract. | Its value depends on what the endpoint means and which dependencies it includes. | Load balancing and service-level health signals. |
| Synthetic transaction | A user-relevant sequence completed. | It takes more setup and maintenance and must handle test data safely. | Critical flows such as login, search, or purchase. |
When selecting a check, weigh its coverage (which failures it can detect), fidelity (how closely it resembles a real request), diagnostic value (how clearly it identifies a failure), and operating cost (setup, noise, and maintenance). A body match is a useful step beyond status alone, but it is not proof that a complete workflow works.
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Health and readiness are different signals
Application health endpoints are useful only when their semantics are clear. Prometheus documents separate endpoints: /-/healthy always returns 200 and is intended to check Prometheus health, while /-/ready returns 200 when Prometheus is ready to serve queries. Its Management API documentation makes the distinction explicit.
This design separates “is the process running?” from “should it receive work?” A service can be alive but not ready to serve requests. Avoid making a single ambiguous endpoint stand in for both questions, or for detailed diagnosis as well.
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Limits to know when configuring a probe
Monitor behavior varies by provider. The following are specific to Amazon Route 53 HTTP/HTTPS health checks, not universal rules for uptime monitoring:
- Basic checks accept HTTP status codes in the
2xxor3xxranges. Route 53 can also search the response body for a configured string; see the HealthCheckConfig API reference. - For Route 53, a TCP connection must be established within 4 seconds, and an HTTP status response must arrive within 2 seconds after connection.
- A configured body string must fit entirely within the first 5,120 bytes of the response. Matching is case-sensitive.
- Route 53 HTTPS health checks do not validate SSL/TLS certificates.
For configurable HTTP probes and response matching outside Route 53, the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter configuration documents available options. Its README describes probe behavior, including the probe_success metric. The project documentation is on its master branch, so configuration details may change.
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