Operational states should answer different questions
- Liveness: is the process able to make progress?
- Dependency state: are required external or internal components available?
- Readiness: may this instance accept the relevant work safely?
- Degraded/unavailable: what explicit state should the host or operator observe?
Why explicit degradation matters
A named degraded state gives integrations something observable and testable instead of silently continuing with reduced guarantees.
What this page explicitly does not claim: This page describes operational design principles. It does not claim a specific SLA, availability percentage, monitoring product or production deployment topology.