openrouter-model-availability

Openrouter Model Availability

Overview

This skill covers monitoring model availability on OpenRouter, implementing health checks, and handling model downtime gracefully.

Prerequisites

• OpenRouter integration
• List of models your application depends on

Instructions

1. Query model status: Periodically call GET /api/v1/models and check if your required models are present; absent models are unavailable
2. Implement health probes: Send lightweight test requests (short prompt, max_tokens: 1) to each critical model on a schedule to verify end-to-end availability
3. Track availability metrics: Log probe results and calculate uptime percentages per model; detect patterns (e.g., models that go down at certain times)
4. Set up alerts: Trigger notifications when a critical model fails health checks or disappears from the models list
5. Automate failover: When a health check fails, automatically switch to a pre-configured fallback model and log the failover event

Output

• Health check service that probes critical models on a regular schedule
• Availability dashboard showing uptime percentage per model
• Automated failover that activates when models become unavailable

Error Handling

Error	Cause	Fix
Health check timeout	Model is slow or overloaded	Increase probe timeout to 30s; distinguish between "slow" and "down"
False positive alerts	Transient network issues triggering alerts	Require 2-3 consecutive failures before alerting; add probe from multiple locations
Model removed from catalog	Provider discontinued the model	Subscribe to OpenRouter changelogs; implement model ID aliasing for easy migration

See ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/errors.md for full error reference.

Examples

See ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/examples.md for runnable code samples.

Resources

• OpenRouter Documentation
• OpenRouter Models
• OpenRouter API Reference
• OpenRouter Status