Though it may seem strange, exposing internal controls as resources can prove useful in a number of cases besides testing such as monitoring, maintenance and debugging. The uniformity of a RESTful API means that many tools already exist for interacting with such resources which can help reduce overall operational complexity.

The kinds of internal resources that are typically exposed include logs, feature flags, database commands and system metrics. Many microservices also include health check resources which provide information about the health of the service and its dependencies, timings for key transactions and details of configuration parameters. A simple ping resource can also be useful to aid in load balancing.