Health dashboard

The Application Health page provides a health snapshot for WordPress applications running on the VIP Platform. Contextual data is displayed here to help identify potential and real issues with an application.

HTTP Response Codes

The HTTP Response Codes section shows you the response codes for the last 24 hours of your application including:

• Total requests
• 5xx responses
• 4xx responses

Hover over each bar to see the breakdown of 4xx responses, 5xx responses, and Other responses for each time period. Other responses refer to all other response codes besides 4xx and 5xx response codes, such as 2xx or 3xx response codes.

• Each bar in the graph represents a one-hour time interval. Times are displayed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
• Data is updated every 15 minutes. Depending on the current time, the last bar in the graph may or may not represent a full hour.

5xx responses

An HTTP 5xx response signals an error on the server side. For example, if an application’s server is no longer able to respond due to a PHP fatal error it encountered, it would produce a 5xx response.

When a spike in 5xx responses occurs, it’s important to identify what part of an application might be the culprit. Here are a few questions to help guide you on how to respond to this problem:

1. Have we deployed any code recently that might have caused unnecessary strain on the servers?
2. Has there been a substantial traffic increase recently?
3. What does New Relic say about our site’s performance? Which parts are having problems?
4. Are there any PHP Errors that might be affecting our site’s performance? (You can see a snapshot of your PHP Errors in your New Relic APM → Errors page.)
5. Is our caching strategy appropriate for our traffic load?
6. What are the main URLs affected by this problem? (To see this, you can review your Access Logs by setting up our Log Shipping Tool.)

5xx status problems can happen for a variety of reasons, so it’s important to look at the full picture of your application to understand what could be happening.

4xx responses

HTTP 4xx responses signal an error on the client side. For example, if someone requests a page that does not exist, they will see a 404 Not Found error. If they request access to an app that’s behind IP restriction, they will see a 403 Forbidden status if their IP address is not allowed.

Most of the time, these are not critical issues that will affect your site. One reason you might want to be aware of which requests are having responses like 404s would be to make sure you are not missing out on redirects to your site. For example, maybe you had a newsletter that went out with a bad link and now all the traffic is ending up at the wrong place. Understanding your 404 requests would help you see what redirects you need to put in place so your audience is directed to the right location.

Further analysis

• The New Relic APM tool is helpful for investigating data and patterns observed in the Health dashboard. New Relic is useful for looking specifically at Transaction traces and Errors to better understand the context. 
• HTTP request log shipping provides data for understanding connectivity issues, performance tuning, usage patterns, and in analyzing service interruptions.