we have a monitoring tool in place that is doing a GET to http://server_iport/alfresco/service/index without providing a user
=> if it returns 401 everything is fine
anything other indicates an issue with the application. we have seen that alfresco can freeze in a way, that webscript urls are callable and return http status 200 but the application is dead and does not respond anymore.
We are using internal "touch" Alfresco URL http:/localhost:8080/alfresco/s/touch, which was used internally for clustering. An HTTP 200 means that everything is fine.