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Monitor Overview

Monitors are the foundation of observability in Upstat. They continuously check your endpoints and track availability, response times, and status across multiple geographic regions.

What Monitors Do

A monitor sends periodic requests to a URL and evaluates whether the response meets your success criteria. When a check fails, Upstat can trigger alerts, create incidents, or run automations.

Each monitor tracks:

  • Availability - Whether the endpoint responds successfully
  • Response time - How long the endpoint takes to respond
  • Status history - A log of status changes over time
  • Regional health - Per-region results when using multi-region monitoring

Monitor Types

HTTP Monitors

HTTP monitors check web endpoints by sending HTTP requests. They support:

  • GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and other HTTP methods
  • Custom ports for non-standard configurations
  • Configurable check intervals from 30 seconds to 24 hours
  • Multi-region checks for geographic redundancy

Heartbeat Monitors

Heartbeat monitors work differently - instead of Upstat checking your endpoint, your system sends periodic pings to Upstat. If a ping doesn’t arrive within the expected window, the monitor fails.

Heartbeats are ideal for:

  • Cron jobs and scheduled tasks
  • Background workers and queue processors
  • Batch jobs and data pipelines
  • Any process that should run on a schedule

Heartbeats are managed separately from HTTP monitors. See Heartbeat Monitoring for details.

Monitor Statuses

Monitors report three possible statuses based on check results across all selected regions:

Status Meaning
Success All regions report successful checks
Partial Some regions are failing, but at least one is healthy
Fail All regions report failed checks

Status changes are logged in the monitor’s event history, providing a timeline of availability.

Status Conditions

You control when a monitor transitions between statuses using condition rules:

Down Conditions define when a monitor should be marked as failing. The default is 3 consecutive failures.

Up Conditions define when a monitor should recover. The default is 2 consecutive successes.

These thresholds help prevent false alerts from transient network issues while ensuring genuine problems are detected quickly.

Entity Relationships

Monitors can be linked to catalog entities to provide operational context. When you link a monitor to a service, the monitor’s status appears on that service’s detail page, and incidents can be correlated across related monitors.