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Also known as: Workflow Status Codes, HTTP Status Codes
Canonical numeric or symbolic values that represent the current outcome or state of a process or interaction.
DESCRIPTION
Status codes communicate discrete states or results in software, APIs, workflows, and data pipelines. Common examples include HTTP status codes for web responses and workflow statuses in business processes. Clear, consistent status codes simplify error handling, monitoring, analytics, and user messaging. Governance includes definitions, lifecycle states, and backward compatibility to avoid breaking integrations.
ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS
MDN Web Docs
HTTP response status codes indicate whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed.
Focuses on web protocol response semantics as a key status code domain.
IETF RFC 9110
The status code is a three-digit integer code that describes the result of the server’s attempt to understand and satisfy the client’s request.
Formal protocol-level definition of HTTP status code semantics.
RELATED TERMS
Enumeration Event States Workflow State Machine API Design RFC 9110 Monitoring
COMPETING TERMS
Error Codes
KNOWLEDGE AREAS
Software Engineering Data Integration & Interoperability Data Architecture Observability & Telemetry
TARGET AUDIENCE
Software Developer Data Engineer DevOps Engineer Data Architect BI Specialist
EXTERNAL SOURCES
- Wikipedia - Status code
- MDN Web Docs - HTTP status codes guide
- IETF - HTTP semantics standard
TOP QUESTIONS
Why are Status Codes important in system design?
They standardize communication of outcomes, enabling consistent error handling, observability, and automation across components and services.
Category: Relevancy
How do Status Codes differ from Error Codes?
Status Codes express overall state or outcome; Error Codes provide granular diagnostics. Both can be used together for clarity.
Category: Comparison
What are best practices for custom Status Codes?
Define a controlled vocabulary, document semantics, avoid overloading, and maintain backward compatibility to protect integrations.
Category: Best practices
How should Status Codes be logged and monitored?
Capture them as structured fields with counts and rates. Create alerts for critical codes and trend abnormalities.
Category: Observability
What mistakes occur with Status Codes?
Using ambiguous codes, mixing transport and business semantics, or changing meanings without versioning confuses clients and operators.
Category: Mistakes
Do Status Codes belong in data models?
Yes, as constrained enumerations with documentation and valid transitions when modeling workflow states.
Category: Modeling
How do HTTP Status Codes map to business outcomes?
Use HTTP codes for transport semantics and embed business status in payload fields to avoid conflation.
Category: Guidance
Can Status Codes be localized?
The code is language-neutral; localize human-readable messages while preserving the canonical code for analytics.
Category: Internationalization
What is a hot topic around Status Codes?
Standardizing error and status taxonomies across microservices to improve reliability and debuggability is a growing focus.
Category: Topic