Site Monitoring

Overview

Site monitoring checks a URL over HTTP or HTTPS on a schedule and records what came back: the status code, the full response-time breakdown, the SSL certificate, and optionally whether the page contains particular text.

A site monitor is not only an uptime check. The same monitor also tracks SSL certificate expiry, domain expiry, captures screenshots, and can run broken-link crawls and Lighthouse audits.

INFO

Site monitors count toward your plan's monitor limit. See Plans & Limits.

Features

• Uptime checks from your chosen location, as often as every 30 seconds on higher plans.
• Response-time breakdown — DNS lookup, connect, TLS handshake, time to first byte and total, so you can tell a slow network apart from a slow application.
• Content checks — alert when the page stops containing expected text, or starts containing text it should not.
• Any HTTP method with custom headers, POST body and user agent.
• SSL and domain expiry alerts well before anything actually expires.
• Multiple monitoring locations — up to five additional locations on paid plans.
• Screenshots of the rendered page, shown in the list and on the overview.

How to Set Up Site Monitoring

1. Sign in to your Pingniner account and go to Sites.
2. Click "New Site".
3. Enter a Name — a friendly name for the list.
4. Enter the URL to monitor, including http:// or https://.
5. Choose a Monitoring frequency. The options available depend on your plan — see Plans & Limits.
6. Choose a Monitoring Location — the region checks run from.
7. (Optional) Enable Lighthouse Check and pick a Lighthouse Schedule of Weekly or Monthly, or leave the schedule empty to run audits manually. Paid plans
8. (Optional) Open Advanced to configure the request — see below.
9. Save. The first check runs shortly afterwards.

Advanced options

Option	Default	Notes
Method	GET	GET, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE
Expected status code	200	Any code from 0–999. Anything else is treated as a failure.
Additional monitoring locations	none	Up to 5 extra locations, excluding your primary one. Paid plans
Timeout	30 seconds	Total request timeout, 1–120
Connect Timeout	15 seconds	Connection phase only, 1–120
POST data	empty	Raw request body
User agent	empty	Sent as the User-Agent header
Headers	empty	Any additional request headers, as key/value pairs
Group, Tags, Notes	empty	Organisation only — see Groups & Tags

TIP

Monitoring an API endpoint that returns 201 or 204? Set Expected status code to match, or every successful check will be recorded as a failure.

Viewing & Managing Sites

Each site has its own sub-navigation: Overview, History, Broken Links, Lighthouse, Triggers, Alerts, Maintenance and Settings.

Overview

Current status and last checked time, plus:

• Certificate Expiration and Domain Expiration, colour-coded — amber under 30 days, red under 10.
• Domain Registration date and Nameservers.
• Monitoring Location and Retention.
• A screenshot of the rendered page.
• Uptime chart, and a response-time chart per monitoring location.

Edit

All the creation fields can be changed later from Settings, including the URL. Changing the URL does not reset history.

History

One row per check, with:

Column	Meaning
Timestamp	When the check ran
HTTP status code	What the server returned
DNS lookup	Time spent resolving the hostname
Connect	Time to establish the TCP connection
TLS handshake	Time to negotiate SSL/TLS
TTFB	Time to first byte
Latency	Total request time
Online	Whether the check passed
Location	Which location ran it

All times are in milliseconds. History retention depends on your plan.

Triggers

Sites come with a fixed catalogue of triggers. You can edit and enable or disable them, but you cannot create or delete them.

Trigger	Value field	Default	Active by default
Offline	—	3 occurrences, impact Down	Yes
Response time	Threshold (ms)	>= 4000, 5 occurrences, impact Degraded	Yes
HTTP Status Code	Expected HTTP Status Code	—	No
Contains	Keyword(s) in the source code	3 occurrences, impact Degraded	No
Does not contain	Keyword(s) in the source code	3 occurrences, impact Degraded	No
Certificate expires	Days	10 days, 1 occurrence	Yes for https:// URLs
Domain expires	Days	10 days, 1 occurrence	No
Median response time	Deviation threshold (%)	>= 100%	Yes on new monitors Paid plans

Each trigger also has Contacts, Occurrences (1–50), Repeating notifications and an Active toggle. See Triggers & Incidents.

INFO

Certificate expires is enabled automatically when the URL starts with https://, and left disabled otherwise. If you switch a site from HTTP to HTTPS later, enable it yourself.

TIP

Contains is the trigger that catches the failure uptime checks miss: a page that returns 200 OK while rendering an error, an empty cart or a stale maintenance notice. Point it at a string that only appears when the page is genuinely working.

Alerts

Every incident raised for this site, with its trigger, start and end times, and when the last notification was sent.

Maintenance

Suppress triggers and notifications for a planned window. Checks continue and data is still recorded. See Maintenance Periods.

Best Practices

• Monitor the URL your users actually hit, redirects included, rather than an internal health-check path that can succeed while the site is broken.
• Add a Contains trigger on anything transactional. Status codes lie.
• Leave certificate expiry at 10 days minimum. Automated renewal usually happens at 30 days, so an alert at 10 means renewal has genuinely failed.
• Use additional locations for performance, not uptime. They tell you whether slowness is regional; a single location is enough to know the site is down.
• Raise occurrences rather than muting a noisy monitor. A site that fails one check in fifty is usually a network blip, not an outage.