Health Endpoints - World Monitor

`/api/health`

Primary health endpoint. Checks all Redis-backed data keys and seed freshness metadata in a single pipeline call. Authentication: None required. Browser origins must still pass the CORS allowlist in api/_cors.js; requests with no Origin header, such as server-side monitors, are allowed. Health responses are never cached (Cache-Control: private, no-store, max-age=0 and CDN-Cache-Control: no-store). HTTP Method: GET

Query Parameters

Parameter	Values	Description
`compact`	`1`	Omit per-key details; only return keys with problems

Response Status Codes

HTTP Status	Overall Status	Meaning
`200`	`HEALTHY`	All checks OK, no warnings
`200`	`WARNING`	Some keys stale or on-demand keys empty, but no critical failures
`200`	`DEGRADED`	Critical keys empty, but ≤3% of all probed keys
`200`	`UNHEALTHY`	Critical keys empty, >3% of all probed keys
`503`	`REDIS_DOWN`	Could not connect to Redis — the only state that returns a non-200 code

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

{
  "status": "HEALTHY | WARNING | DEGRADED | UNHEALTHY | REDIS_DOWN",
  "summary": {
    "total": 194,
    "ok": 180,
    "warn": 5,
    "onDemandWarn": 9,
    "staleContent": 0,
    "crit": 0
  },
  "checkedAt": "2026-03-11T14:00:00.000Z",
  "checks": {
    "earthquakes": {
      "status": "OK",
      "records": 142,
      "seedAgeMin": 8,
      "maxStaleMin": 30
    }
  }
}

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:

Tier	Severity when empty	Description
Bootstrap	CRIT	Seeded data required at startup. Empty means the dashboard is missing critical data
Standalone	CRIT (seeded) / WARN (on-demand)	Populated by seed loops or RPC handlers. On-demand keys are expected to be empty until first request
On-demand	WARN	Populated lazily by RPC calls. Empty is normal if nobody has requested the data yet

Per-Key Statuses

Status	Severity	Meaning
`OK`	Green	Data present, seed fresh
`OK_CASCADE`	Green	Key empty but a sibling in the cascade group has data (e.g., theater posture fallback chain)
`STALE_SEED`	Warn	Data present but `seed-meta` age exceeds `maxStaleMin`
`STALE_CONTENT`	Warn	Seeder is fresh but the upstream content stopped advancing (frozen feed); counted in `summary.staleContent`
`COVERAGE_PARTIAL`	Warn	Record count is below the key’s declared `minRecordCount` (e.g. 10/13 chokepoints or 139/174 PortWatch port-activity countries)
`SEED_ERROR`	Warn	`seed-meta` reports `status: "error"` from the last seed run
`REDIS_PARTIAL`	Warn	A single per-command Redis error on this key’s STRLEN/GET (not a full outage)
`EMPTY_ON_DEMAND`	Warn	On-demand key has no data yet (expected until first request); counted in `summary.onDemandWarn`
`EMPTY`	Crit	Bootstrap or seeded standalone key has no data
`EMPTY_DATA`	Crit	Key exists but contains zero records (and 0 is not a valid state for it)

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:

Domain	Max Stale (min)	Notes
Market quotes, crypto, sectors, earthquakes, insights	30	High-frequency relay loops / critical event data
Military flights	30	Near-real-time tracking
Predictions, flight delays (FAA)	90	Polymarket / airport snapshots
Unrest	120	45min cron, 2h grace
Cyber threats	240	APT data updated less frequently
Wildfires	360	FIRMS NRT accumulates over hours
Climate anomalies	540	3h cron, 3× cadence
BIS extended, World Bank, IMF	2160-100800	Institutional data, weekly/monthly/annual

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

Example Requests

# Full health check
curl -s https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health | jq .

# Compact (problems only)
curl -s "https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health?compact=1" | jq .

# UptimeRobot / monitoring: check HTTP status code
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health
# Returns 503 only when Redis is unreachable (REDIS_DOWN); 200 for every other
# state — the verdict (HEALTHY/WARNING/DEGRADED/UNHEALTHY) is in the body's `status`.

`/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

HTTP Status	Overall Status	Meaning
`200`	`healthy`	All seed loops reporting on time
`200`	`warning`	Some seeds stale (age > 2x interval) or below a declared coverage floor
`200`	`degraded`	Some seeds missing entirely
`401`	-	Invalid or missing API key
`503`	-	Redis unavailable

Response Body

{
  "overall": "healthy | warning | degraded",
  "checkedAt": 1710158400000,
  "seeds": {
    "seismology:earthquakes": {
      "status": "ok",
      "fetchedAt": 1710158100000,
      "recordCount": 142,
      "sourceVersion": null,
      "ageMinutes": 5,
      "stale": false
    },
    "market:stocks": {
      "status": "stale",
      "fetchedAt": 1710150000000,
      "recordCount": 85,
      "sourceVersion": null,
      "ageMinutes": 140,
      "stale": true
    },
    "supply_chain:portwatch-ports": {
      "status": "coverage_partial",
      "fetchedAt": 1710158100000,
      "recordCount": 139,
      "minRecordCount": 174,
      "sourceVersion": null,
      "ageMinutes": 5,
      "stale": true
    }
  }
}

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.

Domain	Interval (min)	Stale After (min)
Predictions, military flights	8	16
Market quotes, earthquakes, unrest	15	30
ETF flows, stablecoins, chokepoints	30	60
Service statuses, spending, wildfires	60	120
Shipping rates, satellites	90-120	180-240
GPS jamming, displacement	360	720
Iran events, UCDP	210-5040	420-10080

Example Request

curl -s https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/seed-health \
  -H "Origin: https://worldmonitor.app" | jq .

Integration with Monitoring Tools

UptimeRobot

Use /api/health as the 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 pretty-prints the body, so the healthy token there is "status": "HEALTHY" with a space after the colon. If you monitor the non-compact URL, match that spaced token instead — the no-space "status":"HEALTHY" is absent even when healthy and will false-alert. Prefer ?compact=1, or parse summary.crit > 0.

Custom Alerting

Parse the JSON response to build granular alerts:

# Alert on any critical keys
STATUS=$(curl -s "https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health?compact=1")
CRIT=$(echo "$STATUS" | jq '.summary.crit')
if [ "$CRIT" -gt 0 ]; then
  echo "CRITICAL: $CRIT data keys empty"
  echo "$STATUS" | jq '.problems'
fi

Differences Between Endpoints

Aspect	`/api/health`	`/api/seed-health`
Scope	Data keys + seed metadata	Seed metadata only
Auth	None (public)	API key or allowed origin
Data fetched	Full Redis values (to count records)	Only `seed-meta:*` keys
HTTP 503	Only `REDIS_DOWN` (DEGRADED/UNHEALTHY return 200)	No (always 200 unless Redis down)
Best for	Uptime monitoring, dashboard health	Debugging seed loop issues
Response size	Larger (~194 keys with record counts)	Smaller (seed-meta domains only)

​/api/health

​Query Parameters

​Response Status Codes

​Response Body

​Key Classifications

​Per-Key Statuses

​Cascade Groups

​Staleness Thresholds (maxStaleMin)

​Example Requests

​/api/seed-health

​Response Status Codes

​Response Body

​Staleness Logic

​Example Request

​Integration with Monitoring Tools

​UptimeRobot

​Custom Alerting

​Differences Between Endpoints

`/api/health`

Query Parameters

Response Status Codes

Response Body

Key Classifications

Per-Key Statuses

Cascade Groups

Staleness Thresholds (maxStaleMin)

Example Requests

`/api/seed-health`

Response Status Codes

Response Body

Staleness Logic

Example Request

Integration with Monitoring Tools

UptimeRobot

Custom Alerting

Differences Between Endpoints