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Key Health Monitoring

Clevername automatically validates your stored API keys every 6 hours. If a key is invalid, expired, or rate-limited, it is flagged on your dashboard so you can take action before it disrupts your agents.

Key Concepts

What is key health monitoring?

Key health monitoring is an automatic background check that verifies your stored API keys are still valid and functional. Every 6 hours, Clevername makes a lightweight validation call to each provider to confirm the key works. If a key fails validation, it is flagged on your dashboard.

What gets checked

The health check verifies:

  • Authentication — does the provider accept the key?
  • Permissions — does the key have the expected scopes?
  • Rate limits — is the key currently rate-limited or throttled?
  • Account status — is the provider account active and in good standing?

Health statuses

Healthy

Key is valid and working normally.

Degraded

Key works but is rate-limited or has reduced permissions.

Invalid

Key is rejected by the provider. Needs replacement.

What Happens When a Key Fails Validation
1

Automatic check runs

Every 6 hours, the health check runs in the background. It makes a minimal API call to each provider (typically a models list endpoint) to verify the key is accepted. This call does not consume meaningful quota or generate costs.

2

Key is flagged

If the provider rejects the key (401/403 response), the key's health status is set to Invalid. If the key is rate-limited (429 response), it is marked as Degraded. The status and last-checked timestamp are stored alongside the key metadata.

3

Dashboard shows the issue

Invalid and degraded keys appear with a warning badge on the API Keys settings page and on any agent that has the key bound. You also receive a notification if you have key health alerts enabled in your notification preferences.

4

You take action

For Invalid keys, you need to replace the key — either by pasting a new one (which triggers interception) or by updating it from the API Keys settings page. For Degraded keys, the issue is usually temporary and resolves on the next check.

On-Demand Health Check

You do not have to wait for the scheduled check. You can trigger a health check at any time:

From the dashboard

Go to Dashboard → Settings → API Keys. Click the Check Health button next to any key. The result updates within a few seconds.

From MCP tools

Use the key_health_check MCP tool to validate a specific key or all keys at once. This is useful for automation workflows that need to verify keys are healthy before starting a batch job.

Tip
On-demand checks are rate-limited to 1 per key per minute to prevent accidental rate-limiting on the provider side.

What Health Monitoring Does Not Do

Health monitoring is a validation tool, not an enforcement tool. It is important to understand the boundaries:

It doesIt does not
Flag invalid keys on the dashboardAutomatically disable agents using invalid keys
Send notifications when keys failRotate keys automatically
Track health history over timeDelete or replace keys without your action
Verify provider account statusCheck billing balances or credit limits
Note
Health monitoring intentionally does not auto-disable agents. A key might temporarily fail validation due to a provider outage. Auto-disabling agents on transient failures would cause more disruption than the failure itself.