You add what you want watched, choose how you hear about problems, and put up a status page for your customers. From then on, Paris checks every monitor on schedule. When a check fails, Amsterdam checks again before we alert you, and the alert tells you where it failed.
Add your first monitors
A monitor is one thing we check: your website, the checkout page, an API, a mail server. Start with what your customers use. For a webshop that's usually the front page, the checkout and anything that takes orders.
Give each monitor a plain name, like Webshop or Checkout. You'll see the name in every alert, and your customers see it on your status page.
Pick a check type
| Check | What it asks | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP | Does the address answer without an error? | Your website, a landing page, an API |
| Keyword | Does the page contain a word you choose? | A page that can load but show the wrong thing, like a checkout without its "Pay now" button |
| TCP | Does a port accept connections? | A mail server on port 587, a database, a game server |
| DNS | Does the name resolve? | Your domain's A record, so a DNS change shows up |
| Heartbeat | Did a scheduled job check in on time? | Backups, cron jobs, exports |
How often we check
On Uptime Pro and Business we check every minute. On the free plan for personal and hobby sites we check every 5 minutes.
Where alerts go
Every plan alerts by e-mail. On Pro and Business you can also send alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams or a signed webhook, so they reach the place your team already looks.
When Paris sees a failure, Amsterdam checks once more. The alert goes out after that, and it names the step that failed: DNS, connect, TLS or HTTP. That tells you who to call. How we confirm an outage explains each step.
When the site answers again, the incident closes by itself and you can see the whole timeline in the app.
Heartbeats for scheduled jobs
Some things go wrong by not happening. A heartbeat monitor gives you a ping address at hb.monitoruptime.eu; your job calls it when it finishes. If the ping doesn't arrive in time, you get an alert. More in Heartbeats: know when a scheduled job silently stops.
Your first status page
A status page is one link your customers can open when something is wrong. It lives at monitorstatus.eu/<your-name> (on Uptime Business, at your own address if you like), hosted separately from your site, so it stays up when your site is down. Incidents appear on it from your monitors, with the time they were detected and resolved, next to each service's uptime history.
| Plan | Monitors | Checks | Status pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uptime Pro, €12 | 50 | Every minute | 3, without the MonitorBase link |
| Uptime Business, €39 | 250 | Every minute | 10, without the MonitorBase link |
| Personal, free | 5 + 1 heartbeat | Every 5 minutes | 1, with the MonitorBase link |
Prices are per month, excluding VAT. The free plan is for personal and hobby use. See status pages for what your customers see, and what to put on your status page for how to set one up.
Questions along the way? Write to me at christian@monitorbase.eu. You'll get an answer within 1–2 days.