def METHOD_NAME():
    """
    Perform an application-level health check.
    This is not part of the published API because it is intended to be used by monitoring tools.
    This returns a 200 response if the application is alive and able to serve requests. It returns
    a 500 response otherwise.
    """
    current_app.logger.info("A healthcheck request was received")
    try:
        start_time = timer()
        db.session.execute("SELECT 1 FROM request LIMIT 0").fetchall()
        end_time = timer() - start_time
        current_app.logger.info("The healthcheck database query took %f seconds", end_time)
    except SQLAlchemyError:
        current_app.logger.exception("The healthcheck failed when querying the database")
        raise InternalServerError()
    return ("OK", 200, [("Content-Type", "text/plain")])