If it's unhealthy, then it's health can't be found, hence the 404. In this case, the resource defined by the URL is, symbolically, the health of your system, and so if it's healthy, you can return a successful response. If you really want to use a response code, I would recommend an additional endpoint called something like 'health' which returns a '204 No Content' when healthy, and a '404 Not Found' when not healthy. You might have better luck getting monitors which can check that. If you don't want to parse JSON in your monitors, you could try putting a custom response header to indicate binary health of the system, e.g., System-Health: true or System-Health: false. Our load balancer and other monitors will parse the JSON and use this field to determine if the system is healthy or not. We're returning JSON for our health check, with a top-level 'isHealthy' field set to true or false. In this case, the requested resource is a health report, so as long as you're returning that successfully, it should be a 200 response. For a GET, this would mean whether or not you can respond with the requested resource. We decided for our purposes that the HTTP response codes should be reporting on your server's success or failure to honor the request.

We just had a similar discussion in our group.

Eclipse development android