Monitoring REST API Availability: Ping and Healthcheck

Ensure your services are up and running — automatically and in real-time

Why monitor your REST API?

Just because your website is working doesn’t mean your API is. Route misconfigurations, database timeouts, or proxy errors can silently break your endpoints — and your users may notice before you do.

Approach 1: Simple ping check

A ping is a regular HTTP request sent to a given URL, such as https://api.example.com/health. It can be run every minute or at another interval.

The expected response:

  • HTTP status code 200
  • Optional JSON body with service info

If the response is not 200 or times out — an alert is triggered.

Example of a healthcheck endpoint

# Flask (Python)
@app.route("/health")
def health():
    return {"status": "ok"}, 200

The healthcheck should be simple and fast. It should not depend on auth, cache, or external services.

How to add monitoring

  1. Create a monitor in your OKchecker dashboard and specify the URL like /health
  2. Choose the check interval (e.g., every 60 seconds)
  3. Set up alerts via Email, Slack, Telegram, etc.

What if the response is slow?

You can define a timeout. For example, if there’s no response within 5 seconds — the API is marked as down. You can also track response time trends.

Authorization headers

If your API requires a token, include it in the headers:

Authorization: Bearer xxxxxx

Best practices

  • Monitor not just /health but also critical routes like /api/v1/orders
  • Validate expected keywords in the response
  • Manually test failure scenarios occasionally

Conclusion

API monitoring is simple but vital. It's always better to know about an issue before your users do. Our service helps you track uptime, latency, and get alerts as soon as something goes wrong.

Start Monitoring