> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://www.worldmonitor.app/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Health Endpoints

> Two health endpoints World Monitor exposes for monitoring data pipeline integrity — Edge Runtime handlers querying Upstash Redis for system state.

## `/api/health`

Primary health endpoint. Checks all Redis-backed data keys and seed freshness metadata in a single pipeline call.

**Authentication:** Compact health (`?compact=1`) is public for uptime and keyword monitors. Detailed health (`/api/health` without `compact=1`) and the operator history view (`?history=1`) require a valid operator/enterprise API key because they expose canonical Redis key names, record counts, and freshness thresholds. Browser origins must still pass the CORS allowlist in `api/_cors.js`; requests with no `Origin` header, such as server-side monitors, are allowed only for compact health unless they include an operator key. 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. Public — no key required.          |
| `history` | `1`    | Operator history view of past health snapshots. Requires an operator/enterprise API key. |

### 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                                      |
| `401`       | -              | Detailed health or history requested without a valid operator/enterprise API key |
| `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

```json theme={null}
{
  "status": "HEALTHY | WARNING | DEGRADED | UNHEALTHY | REDIS_DOWN",
  "summary": {
    "total": 286,
    "ok": 286,
    "warn": 0,
    "onDemandWarn": 0,
    "staleContent": 0,
    "rolloutPending": 0,
    "crit": 0
  },
  "checkedAt": "2026-08-07T08:25:57.776Z",
  "checks": {
    "earthquakes": {
      "status": "OK",
      "records": 142,
      "seedAgeMin": 8,
      "maxStaleMin": 30
    }
  }
}
```

`summary` fields: `total` is one entry per probed key, and grows as panels are added — read it from your own response rather than from this page. `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), and `rolloutPending` is another **subset** of `warn` (a newly deployed schema still inside its bounded deploy-before-cron window). Only `crit` (`EMPTY`/`EMPTY_DATA`) drives `DEGRADED`/`UNHEALTHY`.

With `?compact=1`, the `checks` object is replaced by `problems` containing only non-OK keys.

### Bundle tick heartbeats

`_bundle-runner.mjs` writes `bundle:heartbeat:<label>` on every container start, including skip-all ticks. Member seed-meta cannot see a daily cron that never fires when its sections are weekly or monthly. `/api/health` probes `staticRefBundleTick` (`bundle:heartbeat:static-ref`) and, as of #6806, `staticRefHeavyBundleTick` (`bundle:heartbeat:static-ref-heavy`) — one heartbeat for the consolidated heavy bundle carrying Arms-Suppliers, Military-Bases and Mineral-Production. A 48h silence is `STALE_SEED`. Missing keys before the first tick are `EMPTY` under an expiring acknowledgement, not a page-out.

### Consumer-price source coverage

The consumer-prices-core service exposes `GET /wm/consumer-prices/v1/coverage?market=ae` (the service API key is required). Its response includes attempted, completed, failed, and validator-rejected page counts for the market and each active retailer. `status` is `healthy`, `partial`, or `degraded`; a partial result remains publishable, while a rejected observation is never admitted merely to improve the coverage count. The publisher writes the same snapshot to `consumer-prices:coverage:<market>` and includes its aggregate completion ratio in `seed-meta`, so `/api/health` can distinguish a fresh partial run from a stopped producer.

This operational contract complements, rather than replaces, the source-quality work in [#5445](https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor/issues/5445) and [#5811](https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor/issues/5811).

### Relay ingestion telemetry

The relay's public `GET /health` remains HTTP 200 for Railway/process-liveness probes, but its top-level JSON `status` now mirrors the aggregate ingestion verdict and can be `degraded`; `ingestion.status` carries the same application-level result. It becomes `degraded` when aviation or RSS served coverage falls below its configured floor, or when configured AIS is disconnected, has no usable current-connection position data, or serves zero snapshots after they are requested. AIS WebSocket upgrades time out after 30 seconds by default, and position readiness expires when an open stream stops delivering accepted position reports for five minutes by default; either failure re-enters the bounded reconnect schedule, while retained vessel data remains a stale fallback. Deployments intentionally missing AIS credentials report `enabled: false` and `status: "disabled"`; that optional adapter does not degrade aggregate health.

`GET /health` also adds upstream attempt, throttle, failure, cooldown, position age, and position-freshness threshold details to explain the current verdict. A run of consecutive HTTP 429 upgrade rejections is reported as `consecutiveThrottles`, and once it reaches `AIS_THROTTLE_ESCALATE_AFTER` the reconnect ceiling switches from `AIS_RECONNECT_MAX_MS` to the much longer `AIS_THROTTLE_RECONNECT_MAX_MS` and `throttleEscalated` becomes `true`. A 429 arrives before the API key is sent, so it identifies an egress-IP rate limit rather than a transient stream fault; escalating stops the relay contributing refused requests to the provider's sliding window, which can otherwise sustain the block. Any non-throttle outcome — a different handshake error, a close without a recorded error, or an accepted frame — resets the counter and restores the ordinary ceiling, so ordinary disconnects keep the responsive schedule. `GET /metrics` remains the operational counter surface: it exposes rolling-window per-route counters plus process-lifetime AIS connection attempts, successful streams, throttles, terminal failures, reconnect state, and the same position-freshness telemetry. It also reports timeout, authentication rejection, fallback, served coverage, and RSS feed backoff. AIS snapshot `unauthorizedClient` is tracked separately from upstream authentication failures so client traffic cannot be mistaken for provider health. The `theaterPosture` section attributes each successful theater-posture publication cycle to the upstream that actually fed it (`opensky`, `adsb.lol`, `wingbits`, or `vessel-only`), so healthy publication through the fallback chain is never mistaken for OpenSky recovery; the same source is written as `sourceVersion` on `seed-meta:theater-posture` (with a `producer` field distinguishing the relay loop from the seed-military-flights writer). Unlike the rolling-window route counters, `theaterPosture.sourceCountsSinceBoot` and `emptyRejectionsSinceBoot` are process-lifetime because the seed cadence exceeds the metrics window. `lastRun` carries the latest cycle's source and counts. Published cycles require both the canonical envelope and seed metadata to succeed and include `published: true`, `seededAt`, and write outcomes; a replica-envelope failure is exposed through `redisOk` without hiding a successful canonical publication. Failed canonical or seed-metadata writes include `published: false`, `attemptedAt`, and `reason: "write-failed"`, and do not increment the source counter. Rejected zero-input cycles also include `published: false` and `attemptedAt`, use `reason: "no-input-records"`, and do not replace the last-known-good envelopes or `seed-meta:theater-posture`.

### 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)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| `NOT_CONFIGURED`    | Green    | An optional source adapter this deployment never supplied a credential for (producer wrote `sourceState: "unavailable"`, e.g. the Global Tenders SAM.gov adapter without `SAM_GOV_API_KEY`). Not a fault and not counted as a problem; flips to `OK` on the first run after the credential is added                                                                                             |
| `SOURCE_BLOCKED`    | Green    | The Japan MOD adapter proved no transport path reaches the publisher while retaining fresh reviewed records — either an upstream HTTP 403 after a successful proxy CONNECT (`HTTP_403`), or a target-scoped proxy CONNECT refusal corroborated by a successful control tunnel (`PROXY_TARGET_FORBIDDEN`). Uncorroborated CONNECT refusals, stale, empty, or unreviewed states still fail closed |
| `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     | Aggregate records or a required subgroup is below the key's declared coverage floor (for example, 139/174 PortWatch countries or an empty prediction-market pool)                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| `COVERAGE_DEGRADED` | Warn     | The producer's own coverage diagnostics are missing, or its completion ratio is below the key's `minSuccessRate` (for example, a consumer-price market that completed 4 of 12 retailer pages)                                                                                                                                                                                                   |
| `ROLLOUT_PENDING`   | Warn     | A newly deployed schema whose producer has not reached its first scheduled run yet. **Bounded**: the health runtime persists a deployment-relative `rolloutPendingUntil` deadline in Redis, and the state becomes `EMPTY` (crit) once that passes or once the producer writes its durable activation marker. Counted in `summary.rolloutPending`                                                |
| `SEED_ERROR`        | Warn     | `seed-meta` reports `status: "error"` from the last seed run, a producer that serves last-known-good has failed often enough to cross its declared failure contract (see below), **or** the resilience static index reports one or more failed source adapters                                                                                                                                  |
| `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. Outranks any concurrent producer fault, which would otherwise report the softer `SEED_ERROR` (see below)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| `EMPTY_DATA`        | Crit     | Key exists but contains zero records (and 0 is not a valid state for it)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |

### Producers That Serve Last-Known-Good

Some producers are expected to miss individual runs — an LLM synthesis stage
whose provider times out, for example — while the payload they last published
stays useful for hours. For these keys a single miss is not an outage, so the
producer does **not** write `status: "error"`. Instead it holds `fetchedAt` at
the vintage it is still serving, reports `recordCount` for those served
records, and records the miss as diagnostics:

| Field                      | Meaning                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `consecutiveFailures`      | Misses since the last successful publish; reset to 0 on success                                                                                                                                                                |
| `lastAttemptAt`            | When the producer last tried, successfully or not                                                                                                                                                                              |
| `lastSuccessAt`            | When it last published                                                                                                                                                                                                         |
| `synthesisFailureAgeMin`   | Minutes since `lastAttemptAt`. Emitted only while a streak is open, so it reads as "how long this failure has gone without a follow-up attempt" — a growing value means the stage has stopped running, not that it is retrying |
| `servedGeneratedAt`        | Vintage of the payload currently being served                                                                                                                                                                                  |
| `lastSynthesisFailureCode` | Why the last attempt failed, from a closed per-key vocabulary                                                                                                                                                                  |

<Warning>
  On these keys, `records` and `status` describe **what is being served**, not
  how the last run went. A key reporting `status: "OK"` with `records: 5` and
  `consecutiveFailures: 1` means five cards are on the page and the last attempt
  to refresh them failed. Read the diagnostics above for run outcomes; reading
  `status` alone will tell you the panel is fine, which is true, and nothing
  about the producer behind it.

  That independence has a ceiling. Once the streak reaches the key's
  `warnAfterConsecutive` — 2 for both keys today — the status itself becomes
  `SEED_ERROR`, so a streak of 1 is the largest one that can coexist with `OK`.
</Warning>

Each such key declares thresholds sized to its own cadence, and health reports
`SEED_ERROR` once either is crossed: `warnAfterConsecutive` misses in a row, or
`warnAfterAgeMin` since the last attempt with a miss on record. Because
`fetchedAt` is **not** advanced by a miss, the ordinary `maxStaleMin` age gate
keeps escalating independently — a producer that stops entirely still ages into
`STALE_SEED`. A producer that stops after recording a miss therefore reports
`SEED_ERROR` while retained data is still available. A miss with nothing left to
serve skips all of this and writes `status: "error"` immediately. What happens
once the canonical data key itself disappears is not specific to this contract —
see the fleet-wide rule below.

Two keys use this contract today: `newsInsights` and `marketImplications`.

### Producer Faults vs. Missing Data

`seed-meta` outlives the data key it describes — 7 days against hours for most
canonical keys — so a producer that faulted once and then stopped leaves health
holding two true statements at the same time: *the producer is unhappy* and
*nothing is being served*. Every fault signal is affected, not just the
last-known-good contract above: `status: "error"`, a non-`ok` `sourceState`, a
blocked source, and a crossed failure streak.

**The stronger verdict wins, and ties go to the fault** — it is the only one of
the pair that carries a cause. Concretely:

* A blank key whose absence is critical reports `EMPTY` (crit), never
  `SEED_ERROR` (warn). Without this rule a vanished homepage panel would report
  a warning for the seed-meta's full 7-day life.
* A blank key whose absence is *not* critical keeps `SEED_ERROR`. This covers
  keys where an empty payload is a valid state (`OK`/`STALE_SEED`), keys
  covered by a cascade sibling (`OK_CASCADE`), on-demand keys
  (`EMPTY_ON_DEMAND`), and keys inside a rollout window (`ROLLOUT_PENDING`) —
  none of which should be able to silence a fault the producer actually
  reported.

`errorCode` is published whenever a fault of the `SEED_ERROR` kind fired and the
producer recorded a code — including when the missing-data verdict outranks that
fault and the status ends up `EMPTY`. An escalation to crit never costs you the
reason. (`SOURCE_BLOCKED` publishes no `errorCode`; its cause is the status
itself.) `lastSynthesisFailureCode` is broader still: like the other
last-known-good diagnostics above, it is published on every status whenever the
producer recorded one.

The `resilienceStaticIndex` check also publishes `failedDatasets` when its
static-index seed metadata names failed source adapters. This is a validated,
deduplicated list of at most 50 adapter keys. A non-empty list makes the check
`SEED_ERROR` and remains visible in the public `?compact=1` problem projection.
The sibling `resilienceStaticFao` check shares the producer heartbeat but does
not inherit failures for unrelated adapters.

### JODI China Row

`jodiOil`, `jodiGas` and `lngVulnerability` publish an extra `chinaRow` block
whenever their producer recorded one:

| Field              | Meaning                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                |
| ------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `ok`               | Whether China parsed into a usable record this run                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     |
| `reason`           | Why it did not, from a closed vocabulary: `china-missing`, `china-invalid-month`, `china-stale`, `china-no-measurements`                                                                                                                                                                               |
| `dataMonth`        | China's observation month, when it has one                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             |
| `ageMonths`        | How many months behind the run that observation month is                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| `unavailableSince` | Epoch milliseconds of the first run that **recorded** the gap, carried forward across runs. Best-effort: a run that cannot read the previous `seed-meta` (Redis blip, first run after deploy) re-dates it to that run. Read it as "first run that recorded this gap", never as a measured outage start |

The block never moves the status. China's rows going unusable is an upstream
fact no retry clears — every China row in both JODI files has carried
`ASSESSMENT_CODE 3` ("null/uncertain") since at least 2026-08 — so grading it
would be a warning nobody can act on. What it must not be is silent: the
seeders publish the other 50-57 countries regardless of China, and this block
is what names the country that dropped out.

It describes the producer's **last completed publish**, like every other
`seed-meta`-derived field: on a run that refused or failed, the previous
block stays in place and ages alongside `seedAgeMin`. A producer that reported
`status: "error"` publishes no block at all rather than relaying a verdict it
never reached this run. The block is also **operator-only** — it names a
country, so `?compact=1` strips it under the same rule as `contentFreshness`
and the decision-group breakdown.

Whether the *dataset* is still advancing is a separate, graded signal: both
seeders declare `newestItemAt`/`maxContentAgeMin` from the newest month a
quorum of countries reports a measurement for, so a JODI file that stops
publishing reads `STALE_CONTENT` rather than passing as fresh, and one
fast-reporting country cannot vouch for a frozen file. Countries whose every
field parsed to null are not published at all, so the seeders' country floors
count coverage rather than rows.

Do not confuse `checks.jodiGas.chinaRow` with the `checks.chinaCoverage` entry
below: the first is one country's row inside one source, the second is the
fleet-wide China coverage summary.

### China Coverage Projection

`chinaCoverage` projects the hourly Railway summary at
`health:china-coverage:v1`. The evaluator checks each launched China contract
for both a fresh producer heartbeat and fresh, substantive China content; a
fresh seed cannot hide stale or missing source content. `CHINA_DEGRADED` is a
warning projection for partial or stale coverage, while `CHINA_UNAVAILABLE` is
critical when the summary is invalid or the launched content is unavailable.

The final public composition is monitored separately as
`chinaDecisionSignals`. Its canonical payload must contain all six stable
groups even when individual groups are explicitly unavailable. Health requires
six group records and a seed no older than 60 minutes. Per-source transport
details for policy, exchanges, and cross-Strait publishers remain visible only
in this authenticated operator view; they are not copied into the public
country summary or Pro MCP result.

The six required records count **operationally covered** groups, which is not
the same as populated groups. A group whose state is `unavailable` with the
cause `healthy_quiet_window` is covered: the upstream answered and simply had
nothing qualifying to report, which is not a source failure and needs no
operator action. Its public state and zero-item payload are unchanged — no
event is invented to fill it. Every other unavailable cause
(`insufficient_data`, `provenance_rejected`, `upstream_unavailable`,
`unknown`) is a real failure and stays uncovered, and a cause that is absent or
malformed fails closed as uncovered.

Both health surfaces publish a group breakdown so a shortfall names its own
work item instead of reading as a bare `4/6`: `quietGroups` (nothing to do),
`staleGroups` (chase the source's content), and `unavailableGroups`, each
carrying the group id and its `unavailableCause`.

Blocked China contracts remain visible in the audit with their stable reason
code but are excluded from the strict launched-entry health count.

The launched cross-Strait activity contract audits the durable archive
`military:cross-strait-activity:v1` independently for producer transport and
latest Taiwan MND reporting-window freshness. A fresh seed with a stale
official report therefore remains degraded. Japan Joint Staff reviewed
observations are regional augmentation and do not satisfy the Taiwan MND
content requirement. `/api/health` separately monitors
`military:cross-strait-activity-bootstrap:v1`; fresh canonical data cannot hide
a missing compact UI projection. It also exposes dedicated MND and Japan Joint
Staff transport records. Japan Joint Staff alone reports `SOURCE_BLOCKED`, and
only when retained reviewed records exist and one of two evidenced conditions
holds. `HTTP_403` means the direct request and an upstream response received
after a successful proxy CONNECT both returned HTTP 403 — the publisher itself
refused both paths. `PROXY_TARGET_FORBIDDEN` means the direct request returned
HTTP 403 and the proxy refused CONNECT for the target *while a control CONNECT
to a different contracted host succeeded in the same run through the same
credentials* — the proxy provider forbids this destination specifically, so no
configured transport path exists. An uncorroborated CONNECT refusal, a control
tunnel that also fails, `PROXY_AUTH_FAILED`, stale metadata, a missing source
record, or any other source using the blocked state still fail closed through
the existing `STALE_SEED`, `EMPTY`, or `SEED_ERROR` statuses. The distinction
matters operationally: `PROXY_TARGET_FORBIDDEN` is durable and needs a
different egress to change, whereas a bare CONNECT refusal is a proxy fault to
remediate. Other current fetch failures
report `SEED_ERROR` while the last-good archive remains available.
The bundle freshness gate advances only after the archive, projection, and
both source-health records publish successfully. The public bootstrap retains
the bounded reason codes used for disclosure but omits proxy response
diagnostics; full sanitized diagnostics remain in the authenticated operator
source record.

Operators can obtain the same sanitized, read-only audit with
`node scripts/audit-china-coverage.mjs --json`; add `--strict` to return a
nonzero exit code unless every launched entry is healthy. The audit reads only
the compact Redis contracts and emits status, age, and reason-code summaries—
never credentials or raw upstream payloads.

### 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.

`portwatchPortActivity` additionally requires per-country **content**
freshness, which is a different question from transport freshness and country
cardinality. The seeder reuses a cached country payload whenever upstream
`max(date)` has not advanced, so a run can report a fresh heartbeat and a
complete 174/174 country list while an individual country's observation is
days old. The producer therefore publishes a `contentFreshness` block, and the
check verdict is:

| Condition                                                                                                                                           | Status              |
| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------- |
| Every decision-critical country inside the 144-hour content budget                                                                                  | `OK`                |
| A decision-critical country past budget, future-dated, or absent from the run                                                                       | `STALE_CONTENT`     |
| The block is absent, its counts are missing or arithmetically incoherent, or the producer's declared country set does not cover the set health pins | `COVERAGE_DEGRADED` |

The verdict keys on the **decision-critical** countries — currently `CN` and
`HK`, the two the China corridor control towers read — rather than on all 174.
Health pins both that set and the 144-hour budget in its own config rather than
accepting whatever the producer declares, so a producer-side change cannot
narrow the alarm scope or widen its threshold silently: dropping `CN` from the
seeder's list, or publishing a 30-day budget, would otherwise report `OK` with
China days stale — the exact failure this check exists to catch. A producer set
that covers the pinned countries and adds more is accepted.

The producer's counts are a measurement taken at seeder-run time, and seed
metadata is only rewritten on a canonical-advancing 12-hour run. Health
therefore **re-ages** the oldest decision-critical observation against the
current time rather than trusting the count, so an observation that was inside
budget when the seeder measured it still alarms once it crosses the boundary
between runs. `criticalOldestAgeMinutes` on the wire is the recomputed age, not
the producer's. A block claiming every critical country is fresh but carrying no
usable observation timestamp cannot be re-aged, so it reads as unusable.

`unusableReasons` names which condition failed (`declared_scope_narrowed`,
`fresh_exceeds_covered`, `critical_observation_time_unusable`, …) so a consumer
never has to reconstruct the verdict from the raw counts; `expectedCriticalCountries`
publishes the pinned scope alongside the declared one.

Because the edge function redeploys within minutes of a merge while the producer
is a 12-hour cron, the absent-block case had a bounded deployment-order grace.
The durable marker
`seed-activated:supply_chain:portwatch-ports:content-freshness` could grant it
only inside the compiled window `2026-08-03T10:24:42Z` →
`2026-08-04T06:00:00Z`: one complete producer interval plus six hours of
scheduling slack after the schema shipped.

**That window has closed, and the PortWatch grace is now permanently spent.**
A clean `EXISTS=0` no longer softens anything: a missing PortWatch content block
is `COVERAGE_DEGRADED`, unconditionally. The window is kept in source as the
audit record of what was granted and until when — it is deliberately *not*
reopened, because the producer has since published the block and re-granting the
softening would undo exactly the bound
[#6111](https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor/issues/6111) asked for.

In steady state, therefore, **`contentFreshnessPendingUntil` is not emitted at
all.** It appears only while some key's window is open, which today means only
if a NEW entry is added to `CONTENT_FRESHNESS_ROLLOUT` in
`api/_content-freshness.js` for a newly deployed content schema. Add one there
and the deadline is published automatically on every surface below; do not
extend the PortWatch entry.

While a window *is* open, the grace needs **positive proof**, not merely the
lack of a marker. The `EXISTS` read is three-valued: read-and-present revokes
the softening, read-and-absent grants it while the window is open, and a read
that *failed* or returned a malformed pipeline entry is unknown state and grants
nothing. A pending health entry publishes `contentFreshnessPendingUntil`;
compact health responses repeat the same per-key deadlines in
`summary.contentFreshnessPendingUntil`, so the bound is auditable without
reading the implementation. `/api/seed-health` publishes the same deadline on
its entry, and MCP applies the same shared window to its `stale` boolean while
exposing the optional top-level `contentFreshnessPendingUntil` field in
cache-tool output. The cache refresh path also refuses to serve a warm snapshot
past this deadline. The softening covers **absence only** — a block that is
present is always evaluated, and once the marker exists a block that disappears
fails closed.

The `cfg.activationKey` `pending-activation` path in `/api/seed-health` (and the
matching `ON_DEMAND` policy in `/api/health`) intentionally remains separate and
does not reuse this PortWatch window. Those markers describe optional or
operator-triggered producers for which “no metadata because the producer has
never run” is the expected state, not a newly deployed data schema; there is no
single producer cadence from which to derive a safe deadline. This path never
softens a meta-bearing content-freshness failure. A scheduled content schema
must use `contentFreshnessActivation` and its reviewed window instead. This
closes the clean-absent activation gap in
[#6111](https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor/issues/6111).

Any check whose verdict rested on an unreadable marker carries
`activationUnknown: true`, on both endpoints and in every status. Without it the
payload is identical whether the marker read failed or the producer genuinely
never published — two different remediations (check Upstash for per-command
errors, versus check why the producer stopped writing). The flag reports which
evidence the verdict used; it never softens or hardens anything by itself.

MCP cache tools publish the same flag on their envelope for the same reason. A
tool that consults an activation marker and cannot read it returns
`activationUnknown: true` alongside `stale`, so a caller can tell an unreadable
marker from a producer that regressed — previously that failure was reported
only to Sentry and the two were indistinguishable on the wire. Like
`contentFreshnessPendingUntil` the field is optional: it is declared on every
cache envelope, but only a tool whose freshness check names a
`contentFreshnessActivationKey` can ever populate it.

The seeder reserves cold-fetch slots for the decision-critical countries so they
refresh every run they are a cache miss. The content budget deliberately spans
two full producer rotations: `ceil(174 / 30)` runs at a 12-hour cadence is
about 72 hours, leaving 72 hours of headroom before the 144-hour alarm.
The reservation still matters because it keeps CN/HK from waiting behind the
rest of the bounded queue when many countries become misses together.

The refresh deadline uses the content clock, not the retrieval timestamp. A
successful refetch of unchanged upstream data updates `fetchedAt` but carries
`contentAsOfChangedAt` forward, so a frozen feed remains due for another
decision-critical refresh and cannot hide behind a recent retrieval. If the
upstream still does not advance, the check stays `STALE_CONTENT`: the content
is genuinely old, the seeder cannot fix it, and the alarm reports an upstream
outage rather than an internal rotation delay.
Fleet-wide content staleness is normal by construction: the seeder refreshes at
most 30 countries per 12-hour run, so a full sweep takes about 72 hours; the
two-rotation budget leaves normal tail lag visible without making it an
actionable failure. Alarming on the fleet-wide age would produce a warning
that is always lit and never actionable. The fleet-wide counts
(`coveredCount`, `freshCount`, `staleCount`, `unknownCount`, a bounded
`staleCountries` list, and the oldest observation with its age) stay published
for visibility; only the critical subset moves the status.

The 144-hour budget is deliberately the same one
`china-corridor-source-adapters.ts` applies to a PortWatch observation, so this
alarm explains the China activity-nowcast's `marked_stale` exclusion rather
than contradicting it. Health is inclusive at the boundary and treats a
future-dated observation as stale, both one step more conservative than the
data gate — an alarm should fire no later than the contract it protects.

The MCP freshness envelope over the same seed-meta key carries this dimension
too. `get_chokepoint_status` declares the identical pinned scope, budget, and
activation marker, and calls the same assessor — so it ages the same
`contentAsOfChangedAt` clock described above, and an MCP consumer cannot read
`stale: false` for a key this endpoint calls `STALE_CONTENT`. The parity is
asserted field-for-field against this config rather than left to a comment, and
both surfaces read the activation marker as an `EXISTS`, so its stored value
can never make them disagree.

`/api/seed-health` mirrors the same contract on its own `supply_chain:portwatch-ports`
entry, reporting `coverage_degraded` where this endpoint reports
`COVERAGE_DEGRADED` and `stale_content` where it reports `STALE_CONTENT`. All
three surfaces read the marker three-valued and grant the grace only on a
read-and-absent result. One test loop drives every marker outcome — read-present,
read-absent, and unreadable — against the block shapes that decide the verdict
(fresh, content-stale, absent, and present-but-unusable) through all three at
once, pinning the expected verdict and the status-name mapping above rather than
mere agreement between them.

An MCP caller still sees a single boolean: `stale` does not say *which*
dimension failed, so `/api/health` remains the surface that names the stale
country.

Both sides age the same clock, and it is not the retrieval timestamp. They read
`contentAsOfChangedAt`, which advances only when the upstream's own `max(date)`
advances, falling back to `fetchedAt` only for payloads written before that
field existed. This matters because the seeder force-refetches every country
once its cache passes `MAX_CACHE_AGE_MS`, and that refetch resets `fetchedAt`
while returning unchanged content. Ageing `fetchedAt` would therefore have
admitted a frozen observation as current for one budget window out of every
cache lifetime — the same transport-for-content substitution this check exists
to end, one layer below it.

Named entities are operator-only. `contentFreshness` and the
`chinaDecisionSignals` group breakdown are stripped from the anonymous
`?compact=1` projection, which keeps the status but not which source is
degraded.

`predictionMarkets` also requires at least one published market in each
`geopolitical`, `tech`, and `finance` pool. Its seed metadata publishes
`poolCounts`; missing, malformed, or under-floor counts report
`COVERAGE_PARTIAL` even when the aggregate market count is healthy.

### 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

```bash theme={null}
# Full health check (requires an operator API key)
curl -s https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/health \
  -H "X-WorldMonitor-Key: $WORLDMONITOR_API_KEY" | 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?compact=1"
# 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

```json theme={null}
{
  "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
    },
    "prediction:markets": {
      "status": "coverage_partial",
      "fetchedAt": 1710158100000,
      "recordCount": 87,
      "poolCounts": {
        "geopolitical": 52,
        "tech": 0,
        "finance": 35
      },
      "minPoolCounts": {
        "geopolitical": 1,
        "tech": 1,
        "finance": 1
      },
      "coveragePartial": true,
      "sourceVersion": null,
      "ageMinutes": 5,
      "stale": false
    }
  }
}
```

### 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 below an aggregate `minRecordCount` report `coverage_partial` and `stale: true`. Seeds below a subgroup floor such as prediction-market `minPoolCounts` also report `coverage_partial`, but retain `stale: false` while their producer heartbeat remains fresh so freshness and coverage stay distinct.

**Consumers:** treat `status` and `overall` as authoritative for coverage. Do not rely on `stale` alone — pool shortfalls keep `stale: false` by design. When either coverage floor fails, the entry also sets `coveragePartial: true` so clients that only inspect booleans still see the shortfall.

| 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, market implications | 60             | 120               |
| Shipping rates, satellites                                 | 90-120         | 180-240           |
| GPS jamming, displacement                                  | 360            | 720               |
| Iran events, UCDP                                          | 210-5040       | 420-10080         |

### History ingestion (`intel-history:*`)

Domains prefixed `intel-history:` do **not** describe a seeder's canonical publish. They track whether that collector's post-publish append to the historical intelligence store is still landing:

| Domain                                         | Tracks                                            |
| ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- |
| `intel-history:conflict:acled-intel`           | history appends from `seed-conflict-intel`        |
| `intel-history:military:cross-strait-activity` | history appends from `seed-cross-strait-activity` |
| `intel-history:energy:intelligence`            | history appends from `seed-energy-intelligence`   |

The append is fail-open by design — the canonical publish has already committed when it runs, so a failure must never fail the run. That means the collector's own entry (`conflict:acled-intel`, …) stays `ok` while history silently stops accumulating. These entries are the separate signal:

* `fetchedAt` is the last **healthy** append, never the last attempt. A run that reached the relay advances it; a run that delivered nothing (every chunk rejected, or the wall-clock budget died before the first request) does not. So a broken relay freezes it and the entry goes `stale` on the ordinary 2x-interval rule.
* `status: "error"` means the append failed on two consecutive runs — or, on the very first tick, that a relay credential present during an earlier successful append has since been removed.
* `lastErrorCode` names the cause when there is one: `http_401`, `budget_exhausted`, `all_chunks_failed`, `config_removed`, or a clamped error-class name. Absent when the ingest has never failed.
* `status: "not_configured"` means this deployment has **never** had relay credentials. It is visible but never an alarm — no operator action clears it except provisioning the relay. Losing credentials after a successful append is not this state; it reports `error` with `lastErrorCode: "config_removed"`.
* `recordCount` is the volume the relay accepted on the last successful append. Zero is valid: a run whose records were all deduped still proves the pipeline works.

The richer per-run detail — `lastErrorReason`, `consecutiveFailures`, `missingConfig`, and the inserted/deduped/abandoned counts — is **not** returned by either endpoint. It lives in the Redis record `intel-history:ingest-health:<domain>:<resource>:v1`, which the endpoints project from.

A `stale` or `error` here alongside an `ok` collector means canonical data is fine and the history store is the thing to investigate.

### Example Request

```bash theme={null}
curl -s https://api.worldmonitor.app/api/seed-health \
  -H "Origin: https://worldmonitor.app" | jq .
```

## Integration with Monitoring Tools

### UptimeRobot

Use `/api/health?compact=1` as the public 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 is now an operator view and returns `401` without an API key. Public monitoring should always use `?compact=1`.

### Custom Alerting

Parse the JSON response to build granular alerts:

```bash theme={null}
# 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 (one entry per probed key, with record counts) | Smaller (seed-meta domains only)  |