Web API response for Outage

Question

User1593233503 posted

All - I am consuming a third party Web API in my web application. The business requirement is to show an outage message when the API is down/unavailable. I am trying to find out what is the response code I should be looking for to say the API is down/unavailable. I did some research and found that any status code starting with 4  is due to issues  at the client side and any status starting with 5 tells there is an issue at the server side.(https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html) 

Do I need to show the outage message for all the responses with the code starting with 5? To me that doesn't seem correct because, for example, in case of  "500 - Internal Server Error" the request reached server but it encountered some issue while processing it.  Can you please help in this?

Answer 1

User36583972 posted

Hi Mahantesh Ambiger,

May be you can show the status 404 NotFound.

NotFound indicates that the requested resource does not exist on the server.  

HttpStatusCode Enumeration:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.httpstatuscode(v=vs.110).aspx

You can refer the following link.

Best way to test if a website is alive from a C# applicaiton:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/186894/best-way-to-test-if-a-website-is-alive-from-a-c-sharp-applicaiton

Check if website is online with ASP.NET C#:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1570623/check-if-website-is-online-with-asp-net-c

Best Regards,

Yohann Lu

Answer 2

User-2139489267 posted

 Can you please help in this?

It is better to return Http Status Code: 503

Please refer below link:

http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E503.html