# Health

> Know when a paid route stops working, before agents give up on it.

Source: https://docs.forgeintel.co/health

An x402 sale starts with a valid `402` challenge. If a route returns the wrong status, an invalid challenge, or times out, agents can't pay, and marketplaces may delist it. **Health** checks every paid route on a schedule and tells you when one fails.

## How checks work

Forge sends each paid route one **unpaid** request, the same first request an agent makes, and checks the response:

- **Passing:** a valid `402` challenge, or a **gated** route that advertises it has nothing to sell right now and so quoted no price.
- **Failing:** not returning `402`, an invalid challenge, unreachable, timing out, or path parameters Forge couldn't fill in.

Each result shows the exact request Forge sent, the response it received, and, when the challenge failed, a suggested fix.

## Settings

- **Schedule:** check every 1, 6, 12, or 24 hours, or turn scheduled checks off. You can run a check manually at any time.
- **Alerts:** email one or more people after a chosen number of consecutive failed checks.
- **Pause monitoring** on a route you're deliberately changing, so it doesn't count against you.

The page shows an overall status (**Healthy**, **Degraded** or **Paused**), each route's latest result, open and recovered incidents, and your availability over the last 30 days. On the Services page, a service with a failing route is marked **Needs attention** and says what's failing.

End-to-end payment checks, which complete a real payment, are coming soon.