Health and versions
Three questions get asked about an engine, and they have three different answers. Conflating them is why 'it looks up but nothing works' is a common first report.
Three separate questions#
| Question | Answered by | Why it is separate |
|---|---|---|
| Is the process alive? | The health endpoint | Your platform restarts the app based on this, so it must stay green even when the engine is refusing work. |
| Is it able to serve? | The readiness endpoint | Reports whether the licence is active. An engine can be perfectly alive and correctly refusing everything. |
| Is it the build we expect? | The build stamp on the health response | Version, commit and build time. This is how you tell a stale deployment from a broken one. |
Is it up#
The health endpoint is deliberately ungated: it answers before the licence is checked, so your platform's health check passes on the first push and does not restart-loop an engine that merely has not been configured yet.
Is it licensed#
The readiness endpoint reports the licence state and, when something is wrong, the reason: missing, invalid, expired, or revoked. It deliberately does not echo the licence itself or list the accounts it covers.
If it reports a problem, that is the thing to fix — no amount of redeploying will help. Troubleshooting has the cases.
Is it current#
The health response carries a build stamp: which version, which commit, and when it was built. One request answers “are we running what we think we are running”, which is otherwise a surprisingly hard question to settle.
Because the engine is yours, updating is a push you make when you want it. We tell you when a version matters and why — see deploying the engine.
Wiring it to your monitoring#
- Point uptime monitoring at the health endpoint. It is cheap and it is what your platform already watches.
- Alert on the readiness endpoint separately, so a licence lapsing pages somebody before a technician finds out for you.
- Record the build stampafter each deployment. It turns “did that push land?” into a fact.