Every 5 minutes
Each site is requested every five minutes from our servers. If a request fails it’s tried once more straight away, so a single dropped connection doesn’t wake you up.
Website uptime monitoring
Know your website is alive and working.
Add a web address and Pingvella requests it every 5 minutes. When it errors, times out or stops answering, you’re alerted straight away, before your customers have to tell you.
Five website checks on every plan, including the free one.
Add a URL. We do the checking.
No scripts and nothing to install. Give Pingvella the address of your site, API or health page, choose where alerts should go, and it starts straight away.
Catches the real problems
Server errors, timeouts, refused connections, addresses that stop resolving and expired SSL certificates all count as down. A healthy site returns a 2xx response, after redirects.
Response time on record
Every request records how long the site took to answer, so a page that is slowly getting slower shows up in the run history long before it falls over.
What happens when your site goes down
- The check goes down and an incident opens. The time it started is recorded, so the uptime chart and incident list show exactly how long you were affected.
- You’re alerted. Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram or a webhook, whichever you attached to the check. Anyone with the dashboard open also sees an alert on screen.
- It recovers on its own. The next successful request resolves the incident and sends a recovery notice, and the incident stays on record with its start and end.
Pause a check during planned maintenance, and resume it when you’re done. Pingvella requests the site again straight away, so you know it came back.
No health page yet? Use ours.
Pingvella needs an address that answers with a normal page when your site is up. Your homepage works, but a dedicated page keeps it simple and stops a busy page being fetched every few minutes. Download a ready-made one, upload it to your website, and add its address as the check.
Download pingvella-health-check.html
- Upload
pingvella-health-check.htmlto the root folder of your website. - Open
https://your-site.example/pingvella-health-check.htmlin a browser. You should see the words “Pingvella Health Check”. - Add that address as a website check in Pingvella.
It’s a plain page that says “Pingvella Health Check” in the middle of the screen, and tells search engines not to index it. Because it’s a static file it proves your web server is answering, not that your application or database is working. To check those too, point the check at a page that uses them, such as a status route in your app.
Safe by design
Because Pingvella makes the request for you, it only ever requests public web addresses. Anything that points at a private network, a loopback address or a cloud provider’s internal service is refused, redirects are checked at every step, and credentials in a URL aren’t accepted. Pingvella can’t be used to probe your, or anyone else’s, internal systems.
Site behind a firewall? Check from inside.
For an internal site, run the request yourself and check in to Pingvella only when it succeeds. curl -f fails on any error response, so a broken site never checks in, and the silence raises the alert.
curl -fsS -m 10 -o /dev/null https://intranet.example/health && \
curl -fsS -m 10 -o /dev/null https://pingvella.com/ping/your-check-uuid
This uses a regular cron or heartbeat check, so it works for anything you can test from a script: APIs, queues, databases, login pages.
Questions about website monitoring
Can Pingvella tell me if my website is down?
Yes. Add a website check with the address of your site or health page and Pingvella requests it every 5 minutes. A non-2xx response, a timeout or a connection or certificate error marks it down and sends your alerts, with a recovery notice when it is back. Every account can have five website checks. For sites that are not reachable from the internet, run the request from your own scheduler and check in only when it succeeds.
How often is my website checked?
Every 5 minutes. If a request fails it is tried once more straight away, so a single dropped connection doesn’t raise a false alarm.
What counts as my website being down?
Anything other than a successful 2xx response once redirects are followed: an error page, a timeout, a refused or dropped connection, an expired or invalid SSL certificate, or an address that no longer resolves.
Can it check a site on a private network?
Not directly: Pingvella only requests public web addresses. For an internal site, run the request from your own server or scheduler and check in to Pingvella only when it succeeds. If the site stops answering, the check-ins stop and you are alerted.
Start in a couple of minutes