Techniques are described for selectively triggering fast reroute of traffic by enhancing a protocol used for monitoring operational status of a forwarding plane of a router. The forwarding plane of the router outputs periodic messages that, when received by a peer router, provide an indication that the forwarding plane is operational and able to forward packets. In addition, when constructing the periodic messages, the forwarding plane embeds an indication of a status of internal communication between the forwarding plane and a control plane of the router. In this way, the forwarding plane of the transmitting router provides an indication to the peer router that, although operational, the forwarding plane may be operating according to stale forwarding information.