HTTP Status Code for database is down

http-status-codes
Guy picture Guy · Sep 16, 2009 · Viewed 37.4k times · Source

I have a page on my web site that reports on the health of the site and sets an HTTP 200 status code is everything is okay. This page is used by an external monitoring program to check that the site is up.

When this page is hit, I make a very lightweight DB proc call to see if the DB is up and okay. If this fails, I want to return a meaningful HTTP error code to the monitor to let it know that all is not well.

From what I can work out there's no HTTP status that says "a third party component that I rely on is down" so what what would you return in this case?

503 Service Unavailable...?

Answer

Tomas picture Tomas · Sep 16, 2009

That's exactly what a 503 is.

503 means that the server was relying on connecting some other service, which did not respond in time.

Server Error 5xx

Checked up on Wikipedia and the listing there seems to imply that a 504 would be the one I'm thinking of. Quite possibly the link over is outdated.

So:

504 Gateway Timeout

The server was acting as a gateway or proxy and did not receive a timely request from the downstream server.

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