Heartbeat response no longer shows the reason phrase since Access Manager version 4.4.3

  • 7023993
  • 08-Jul-2019
  • 08-Jul-2019

Environment

NetIQ Access Manager 4.4.3
NetIQ Access Manager 4.4.4
NetIQ Access Manager 4.5

Situation

Since NAM version 4.4.3 the heartbeat response no longer shows a reason phrase.

Before NAM version 4.4.3 the response showed as below:
GET /nidp/app/heartbeat HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.37.0
Host: host.example.com
Accept: */*
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 
From version 4.4.3 and higher the response showed as below without reason phrase:
GET /nidp/app/heartbeat HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.37.0
Host: host.example.com
Accept: */*
HTTP/1.1 200

The reason that no response phrase is included since NAM version 4.4.3 is that it ships with a newer version of Tomcat. (version 8.5.32)
Tomcat 8.5 dropped support for the reason phrase but still allows to add an attribute to the connector to enable the reason phrase till it will get deprecated with Tomcat version 9.
 

Resolution

The name of the attribute is called sendReasonPhrase and more information can be found on the below link:
https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/config/http.html

Note: This option is deprecated and will be removed in Tomcat 9. The reason phrase will not be sent