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A health endpoint that returns a count instead of a service name is not wrong by default. Whether the response is correct depends on who calls the endpoint and what they need to do with the answer. The symptom alone cannot tell you whether the count is a tally of dependencies, an aggregate of checks, a deliberate privacy choice, or a defect. The useful work is to capture the real response, identify each consumer, and decide what a public response should disclose.
What the symptom does and does not establish
Three things are unknown from the symptom: which service is answering, what the count measures, and why the endpoint is reachable without credentials. A count could be the number of healthy downstream components, the number of failed checks, the number of queued jobs, or a placeholder the framework emits when no detail is requested. Each of those has a different fix. Treat any explanation that starts with “the endpoint returns a count because” as a hypothesis until you have seen the response.
Returning a count is also not automatically safer or more useful than returning a name. A name can help an operator locate a failing service. A count can hide which component is failing. The right choice depends on the consumer, as the sections below explain.
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A public API response can be inspected directly, so start with the raw HTTP exchange rather than a dashboard or a client library’s summary. Record the following for an unauthenticated request:
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- The full request URL, including path and any query parameters.
- The HTTP status code and the response headers, especially
Content-Type,Cache-Control, and any authentication challenge. - The complete response body, without trimming fields.
- The authentication state: no credentials, then a valid credential for the same route.
A basic capture with curl looks like this, using a hypothetical host:
curl -i https://health.example.com/health
Repeat the request with the authorization header your monitoring or operations tooling normally uses, and compare the two bodies field by field. If the public and authenticated responses are identical, the count is not a privacy filter. If they differ, the difference is the design question you need to answer.
Identify who the response is for
Most health endpoints serve one of four consumers, and each needs a different amount of detail. The table below uses the comparison axes that matter for this decision: consumer need, detail level, access model, and the sensitivity of what is disclosed.
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| Consumer | What it needs from the response | Typical detail level | Typical access model | Sensitivity to watch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Liveness probe (orchestrator) | Whether the process should be restarted | Status only | Internal network, often unauthenticated | Low, provided the route is not reachable from the internet |
| Readiness probe or load balancer | Whether to send traffic to this instance | Status, sometimes a coarse result | Internal network or public edge | Low to moderate |
| Monitoring system | Which component failed and how | Component checks | Authenticated or network-restricted | High: dependency names, versions, hosts |
| Operator or on-call engineer | Diagnostic detail for troubleshooting | Full component diagnostics | Authenticated, least privilege | High |
| External user or partner | Whether the service is available to them | Status only | Public | Should be minimal; names of internal systems are rarely needed |
If your endpoint serves an external user, a count may be the most information that user needs. If it serves a monitoring system, a count may be too little, and the monitoring team will need named components behind authentication or a network boundary.
Decide what a public response may disclose
Use this checklist to sort each field in the response:
- Does an unauthenticated caller need this field to take an action? If not, remove it from the public response.
- Does the field name an internal host, service, database, queue, or version? Treat it as infrastructure information and move it behind authentication or network controls.
- Does the field contain user data, identifiers, or business logic values? Remove it from any public route.
- Does the field help an attacker map the system more than it helps a legitimate caller? Reduce it to a status value.
- Are error messages generic? Failure responses should not expose stack traces, dependency connection strings, or internal exception text.
Keep a minimal public signal only when an external consumer needs it. Place richer component checks behind authentication or network restrictions when they expose operational details.
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Verify behaviour across authentication states
Field filtering in a user interface is not an access control. A browser page or mobile app may hide a field, but the raw API response can still contain it. The OWASP Web Security Testing Guide describes excessive data exposure this way: “Excessive data exposure occurs when an API returns more information in its responses than the client needs to display or function.” The practical test is to compare what the client shows with what the server returns.
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- Send the same request with each credential type your system accepts, including a low-privilege account if one exists.
- Search every body for internal hostnames, IP addresses, version strings, stack fragments, identifiers, and personal data.
- Confirm that the server, not the client, omits fields that a given caller should not receive. Do not rely on a front-end script to hide them.
- Repeat the test from outside your network if the route is reachable from the internet.
How established health-check designs handle detail
Several published designs show how selective detail can work. They are models, not universal requirements, and you should adapt them to your own risk.
The CMS Health Check RFC
The CMS Health Check RFC allows a client to request named checks through a names query parameter, so a caller receives only the components it asks for. Its security guidance is direct: “For security reasons, any implementation receiving an HTTP request should only respond if the request is made over HTTPS and includes a valid security token.” This is a design requirement of that RFC. It is not a rule that applies to every health endpoint.
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The Health Check Response Format
The Health Check Response Format uses the application/health+json media type. Its only required member is status. Optional members include version, releaseId, notes, output, checks, links, serviceId, and description. The specification says checks can carry details about downstream systems and components. A practical reading is that a public response can contain only status, while a restricted response adds checks. Whether you should include serviceId or description publicly is a decision the format leaves to you.
Open Policy Agent
The Open Policy Agent API reference describes a basic health result that reports operational status. It also documents optional checks, such as whether bundle activation or plugin state is healthy. The pattern is the same: a basic status is cheap to expose, and deeper checks are opt-in.
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- The count changes between identical requests with no change in system state. Check for caching, a shared proxy, or a route handler that returns a different schema under load.
- The count is zero even when a dependency is known to be down. The aggregator may be skipping checks. Compare the output with the logs for the check runner.
- The authenticated response contains the name, but the public response contains only a count, and the code path that builds the response changed recently. Review the commit that introduced the filter, and confirm the filter is intended.
- Monitoring tools fail to parse the response after a deploy. Confirm the response conforms to the media type your tools expect.
Whatever the cause, change the behaviour in the server response itself, then repeat the capture steps above so the fix is verified against the raw body.
Decision rule
Keep a public health endpoint minimal: a status and nothing that identifies internal components. Move component names, dependency states, versions, and diagnostics to an authenticated or network-restricted route, and give monitoring and operators access to that route. If the current count is intentional, document what it counts and who it serves. If it is accidental, fix the server response and verify it with unauthenticated and authenticated requests. Without the endpoint contract and representative responses, no one can say which of these applies to your service.
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