Features

Web page checks

Every time we fetch a page, we try these tests:

  1. Can we look up the domain name?
  2. Does the server respond to our attempt to connect?
  3. If it's a secure page (https) is the certificate valid?
  4. When we ask for a page, does the server return a 200 status code?
  5. Does any content come back or is the page empty?
  6. If keywords are provided, does the page contain them?
  7. If error-keywords are provided, check that they are not present.
  8. How long did it take to fetch the complete page?

Every request is logged and the result of each test is saved.
If an early test fails (like the DNS lookup failing), then later tests might not be run.
We keep track of whether the test failed or was skipped.

Monitoring API endpoints and other services

If you can hit an API endpoint with a regular HTTP request and it returns a 200 status code it will work just fine. If you need to send special headers or there is an authorization process it won't work. yet. Let us know if this is a feature you need.

Limitations

We can't check your VPN, email, sign-up flows, or any logged-in pages yet. A successful page's status code must be 200, at this time even redirects will count as failures. Bot protection may be a problem if it is set very aggressively. Talk to us if you have a special request that would improve UPZO for all.

Alert options

Each web page that we monitor can have alerts enabled or disabled on its monitor details screen.

You choose the alert channel for your account on your account settings screen.
Initially this is only email, but at launch we will add text-messages and Slack.
More channels will follow.

Cutting down on alarm fatigue

To reduce false alarms and alarm fatigue, we do the following:

  1. Only send alerts when a monitor fails twice in a row. Every failure is logged, and you will see the failure rates, but we only bother you if the condition is confirmed.
  2. You can 'snooze' any monitor for 24 hrs with a button on the monitor details page.
  3. If more alarms go off soon after we alerted you about the first one: we send one more alert, saying there are multiple alarms. We do not send any further alerts for 6 hours or until you reset the alarms from your dashboard page.

If you really want to receive every single alarm, you can elect that behavior on your account settings page, but it's not the default.

Data retention and long-term statistics

We keep:

  1. all test details data for 30 days.
  2. details on failed checks for 90 days.
  3. a pass/fail for every page request for 1 year
  4. a daily percent success for each page for 5 years.

You can download your data history from each monitor details page.

Our database is backed up daily