What Amazon Route 53 Health Check does
Amazon Route 53 health checks monitor the availability of resources such as web servers and email servers on behalf of AWS customers. A customer creates a health check specifying the endpoint's IP address or domain name, the protocol (HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP), a request interval, and a failure threshold, and Route 53 then sends requests to that endpoint at the configured interval. If the endpoint fails to respond for the configured number of consecutive requests, Route 53 marks it unhealthy and can trigger CloudWatch alarms, SNS notifications, and DNS failover away from the unhealthy resource. If you see this traffic in your logs, an AWS account has configured a health check targeting your endpoint.
How to control Amazon Route 53 Health Check
Target Amazon Route 53 Health Check in your robots.txt with the Amazon-Route53-Health-Check-Service token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Amazon Route 53 Health Check
User-agent: Amazon-Route53-Health-Check-Service
Allow: /Block Amazon Route 53 Health Check
User-agent: Amazon-Route53-Health-Check-Service
Disallow: /How to identify Amazon Route 53 Health Check
Temso identifies Amazon Route 53 Health Checktraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
Amazon-Route53-Health-Check-ServiceAmazon Route 53 Health Check FAQ
What is Amazon Route 53 Health Check?
It is the AWS Route 53 service that monitors the health of resources such as web servers by sending HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP requests to an endpoint at an interval configured by an AWS customer. Results can trigger CloudWatch alarms, notifications, and DNS failover.
How do I block Amazon Route 53 Health Check?
The AWS documentation does not state that the health check service reads robots.txt; these are availability probes configured by an AWS account against a specific endpoint, not a web crawler. The reliable options are blocking the requests at your server or firewall, or having the AWS account owner delete the health check.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
