Glossary · Types of monitoring
Synthetic monitoring tests a website or API with scripted requests from outside, on a schedule, to check that it is available, correct and fast, whether or not real users are visiting at that moment.
A synthetic check can be one request, such as “does the home page return 200 and the expected text?”, or a journey of several steps, such as logging in, searching and checking out. Because it runs the same way every time from known locations, results are comparable, and a failure is found even at 3 a.m. with no traffic.
Its limit is coverage: it only tests the paths you script, from the places it runs. Real user monitoring complements it by measuring what actual visitors experience on their devices and networks, but only when they visit.
Use synthetic checks for availability and for the journeys that make money, and to catch problems before users do, for example right after a deploy.
Uptimecheck runs HTTP(S), ping and port checks as often as every minute, with status code, keyword, JSON and header checks. Multi-step flows log in, submit forms and call APIs step by step, passing values such as a token from one step to the next, and can run in a real browser (at most every 15 minutes) with a screenshot of the step that failed. All checks run from Stockholm today.
14-day free trial · No credit card required
Agencies 7 min read
Monitoring only the homepage misses most outages. A checklist of the URLs and checks that matter, from login and checkout to webhooks, cron jobs, SSL, DNS and servers, with example setups.
ReadGuides 5 min read
An API can return 200 and still be broken. A practical checklist for API monitoring: methods, headers, request bodies, authentication, expected responses and response time thresholds.
ReadGuides 5 min read
Uptime monitoring checks your website or API on a schedule and alerts you when it fails. How checks work, which interval to choose and what uptime percentages mean in minutes.
ReadUptime monitoring is the simplest kind of synthetic monitoring: one request, checked for a good answer. Synthetic monitoring also covers journeys of several steps and checks of content and timing.
They answer different questions. Synthetic checks tell you whether a journey works right now, even without visitors; real user monitoring tells you how fast it is for your visitors. Start with synthetic checks for availability.
Simple HTTP checks don’t run JavaScript, so tag-based analytics such as Google Analytics don’t count them, while server logs do. Filter them out there by user agent; Uptimecheck’s contains “Uptimecheck”.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
14-day free trial · No credit card required
With your OK, Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity show us which pages help and where visitors get stuck. They set cookies for up to 13 months. Without your OK, neither of them runs. You can change your mind at any time under Cookie settings at the bottom of the page. Privacy policy