We've scripted many of the administrative tasks associated with Spotfire including scripts that update all our nodes to the latest version by reinstalling the services (it would be great if there were a command line command for doing the update, but that's a separate idea which I submitted a while back).
I'd like the ability for our scripts to check on the status of services on one node before moving on and updating services on subsequent nodes - thus ensuring that we always have some nodes available. The list-service-instances command lists the instances, but doesn't tell you if they're up and running - it will return the fact that an instance exists before it is ready to receive requests from users. If the command included the status I could react to that status in my scripts.
Not exactly what you want but you can get the service status by querying the NODE_SERVICES table and looking at the STATUS column.