Enhancement to the Confluence Data Center status endpoint:

• Endpoint:
  http://<confluenceurl>/status

• Documented here:
  [Confluence Data Center Technical Overview | Enterprise Data Center Latest | Atlassian Documentation|https://confluence.atlassian.com/enterprise/confluence-data-center-technical-overview-612959401.html]

Current behavior

As documented, the /status endpoint indicates whether Confluence is running as a service on the application server. In our environment, this behaves as a basic liveness check:

• When Confluence has started and is in the RUNNING lifecycle state, /status returns:

• • HTTP 200 OK

• • Body: {{ {"state":"RUNNING"}

    }}

This shows that /status is not sufficient as a load balancer health check in real-world failure scenarios where the JVM/Tomcat process is still up but the node is effectively unusable for users.
 

Suggested Improvement

1. Enhance the existing /status endpoint

Add deeper health checks behind /status so that it can:

• • Detect when the node is in a degraded state where typical Confluence web requests are failing (e.g. persistent HTTP 5xx).

• • Return a non‑2xx HTTP status or a state such as "ERROR" in those situations, rather than always returning "RUNNING" as long as the process is up.

1. Or, provide a new official “readiness” / “deep health” endpoint

• • Document a separate endpoint specifically designed for load balancer health checks in Confluence Data Center.

• • This endpoint would:

• • • Perform minimal but meaningful application-level checks (e.g. routing, core plugin health).

• • • Return a failing HTTP status when the node is not actually usable by end users, even if the process is still running.

• • Keep /status as a lightweight liveness endpoint, but recommend the new endpoint for LB health checks in Data Center deployments.

Main goal is to have a supported, documented endpoint that:

• Can safely be used by load balancers and monitoring systems.

• Accurately reflects when a node should be taken out of rotation because it is no longer serving user requests successfully.