Initial health check status of inverted disabled health checks

Thank you for your question about the initial health check status of inverted and disabled health checks in Amazon Route 53. There are a few important points to consider in this scenario:

1. Inverted health checks: You are correct that for an inverted health check, Route 53 typically considers it to be unhealthy initially until there's enough data to determine its actual status.

2. Disabled health checks: When a health check is disabled, its behavior can be different from an active health check. Disabled health checks do not perform actual health checks, and their status may not be immediately reflected in the same way as active health checks.

3. Initial status reporting: The brief non-zero value (~0.25) you observed in the health check status metrics could be due to the initial state of the health check being reported before the system fully processes the inverted and disabled status.

4. Multi-value answer records: In the case of a multi-value answer record using this health check, the behavior would depend on how Route 53 interprets the disabled state of the health check.

Given that the health check is both inverted and disabled, the exact behavior in a multi-value answer record scenario is not entirely clear from the provided information. Generally, Route 53 doesn't return IP addresses for unhealthy endpoints in multi-value answer records. However, the disabled state of the health check introduces some uncertainty.

To ensure the desired behavior in your DNS routing, it would be advisable to:

1. Enable the health check to get a more accurate representation of its status.
2. Monitor the health check status over a longer period to observe its consistent behavior.
3. Test the multi-value answer record configuration with this health check to verify the actual behavior in your specific setup.

If you need a definitive answer for your particular use case, it would be best to contact AWS support for clarification on how Route 53 handles inverted and disabled health checks in multi-value answer records.
Sources
How Amazon Route 53 determines whether a health check is healthy - Amazon Route 53
Creating Amazon Route 53 health checks - Amazon Route 53