Is there a standard way to check if a web API is alive? As a developer, I have been involved in producing a number of assorted web-APIs, both for internal and public use.

Is there a standard (or de facto) way of checking if a web API is up and running?

(And possibly report back e.g. deployment info and other metadata.)

Web APIs usually don't have a handler for a GET to the root-URL, and often require authentication for the other URLs. Sometimes I have solved this by adding a specific GET http://example.com/alive or GET http://example.com/hello handler in order to enable our devops to monitor the API and to make it easier for myself to quickly check if it is running. It would be nice if there was a more... official way. (:
It would be nice if there was a more... official way. (: If this is not an official way how to check it? One could also say that if there are only POST's then why not using a POST? 

Some services only have POST and these are checked by doing an automated POST every X minutes and check the output. If the POST fails then the monitor system will notify the team.