Can I access a self hosted Wordpress Install via it's IP or How does one properly set up WP on a load balancer?

Situation: We're setting up a load-balancer with a self hosted WordPress (4.6) Networks on RHEL 7. MariaDB is replicated via master-slave.

Problem: However, our network team want to point the load-balancing monitor trigger to http://IP/canary-page. There is a certain string we look for. If present, the DNS stays on the primary IP address. If not present (server issue or manually altered), the DNS changes to the fail-over instance.

Question: Can one access a WP site via it's IP?

If the answer to the above question is yes, then the rest of this doesn't matter.

I tried to set up domain aliasing through wordpress-mu-domain-mapping but this doesn't not appear to allow any aliasing of the base site ("site 1"). This complicates the matter. Since I couldn't alias site 1, I thought of the option below.

Alternative options: My other thought was to create a subsite in the networks install called Canary. Since the database is replicated it would have the same primary domain (http://my-canary-url). At the WP level, we could also assign domain aliases of both my-canary-pirmary and my-canary-failover.

Then at a DNS level, the load-balancer would use my-canary-url. We'd point my-canary-primary to the primary instance and my-canary-secondary to the fail over installation.