How to create your first monitor?

Creating Your First Monitor

A monitor is your automated watchdog for your services. 🕵️‍♀️ It periodically checks your endpoints to ensure they are up, performant, and returning the correct data. Think of it as a curl command that runs 24/7.

This guide will walk you through creating and configuring your first HTTP monitor.

Get Started in 1 Minute

Let’s get your first endpoint check up and running.

1. Create the Monitor

Navigate to the Monitors page from the sidebar and click the + Create Monitor button.

2. Configure the Basics

To get started, you only need two things:

• Name : A descriptive name so you can easily identify it (e.g., “API - Production Health Check”).
• URL : The full URL of the endpoint you want to test (e.g., https://openstat.us).

Once you’ve set the URL, we’ll automatically begin tracking key metrics for every check:

• Response Time

• Status Code

• Response Headers

• Detailed Timing Metrics (DNS lookup, TCP connection, TLS handshake, etc.)

  

3. Customizing the HTTP Request

You can customize the HTTP request to simulate real user traffic or test specific scenarios.

HTTP Method

Choose the HTTP method for your check. While GET is the default, you can also use POST or HEAD or any other HTTP method.

• GET: Retrieve data from an endpoint. The most common choice for health checks.
• POST: Send data to an endpoint, for example, to test a form submission or API creation endpoint.
• HEAD: Same as GET, but without the response body. Useful for quickly checking if a resource exists.

Request Body

If you select the POST method, you can specify a Body to send with your request. This is perfect for testing API endpoints that require a JSON payload.

Custom Headers

You can add any number of custom HTTP headers to your request. This is useful for:

• Sending an Authorization token to test a protected endpoint.

• Setting an Accept header to request a specific content type (e.g., application/json).

• Simulating a request from a specific device or client.

  Heads Up: We’ve got your User-Agent covered! OpenStatus automatically includes the "User-Agent": "OpenStatus/1.0" header in every request. This makes it easy to identify and filter out our monitoring traffic from your server logs or analytics.

Fine-Tuning Your Monitor ⚙️

Once you’ve set up the basics, you can further refine your monitor’s behavior with these advanced options:

Assertions

Frequency

Locations

Timing

Important Considerations

Monitoring Third-Party Endpoints

Note

If you’re monitoring a URL you don’t own (like google.com or a partner API), your requests might be blocked by firewalls or rate limiters (e.g., Cloudflare). This is a security measure on their end to prevent scraping or denial-of-service attacks.

Video Tutorial

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Create your first monitor