How does it work? - Checkpoints
- What are checkpoints?
- How many checkpoints can I use?
- Do new checkpoints automatically appear in my settings?
- Can I exclude certain checkpoints?
- How do I exclude Uptrends' visits from Google Analytics?
- What are the IP addresses of the checkpoints?
- Why do we force you to use at least two checkpoints?
Uptrends has partnered with leading infrastructure and connectivity providers to establish a global network of checkpoints. The 50+ Uptrends checkpoints are available in major internet backbone locations and datacenters all over the world on every continent and in the major cities and countries. The Uptrends checkpoints give you a realistic and accurate feedback of the performance of your internet services. You can feel confident, knowing that we operate a high quality, high performance and reliable monitoring network. Your website and servers are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week from points around the globe.
Our checkpoints are web services installed on a server, which provide a real browser call of your website, server or transaction every 5 or 10 minutes. If you want to see an overview of all our checkpoints, please visit the full list of all our international checkpoints including their IP addresses.
You can use all the checkpoints that are available. The default setting of every account is that all checkpoints are selected.
New checkpoints automatically appear in your settings when you have selected all. When you have chosen for a manual selection you have to add them yourself. If we add new checkpoints, you will be notified via our newsletter, our website, our Twitter account or our RSS feed.
Yes, this is possible. Go to a specific probe that you have setup, and click on the tab 'Checkpoints'. In this screen, click on the 'Edit' link, which is located in the right corner. If you select 'Exclude' as the checkpoint mode, you can define which checkpoints you want to exclude.
Important: Only transaction, Real Browser and Full Page Check probes cause real visits in your Analytics account.
For transactions, you have to set up filters for all our IP adresses. You can use our list of monitoring stations including their IP addresses to set up a filter in your Google Analytics account (links to Google Analytics Installation Guide).
For Full Page Check and Real Browser Check probes, please use the instruction below. We will guide you through a step-by-step instruction for creating a filter to prevent our automatic requests from being collected in GA. First you need to fill in a certain User Agent string, which you can make up yourself. I would suggest to use "Uptrends". Navigate to "Manage", "Probes", select a certain probe, click on "Advanced", and change the value of the User Agent field by clicking on "Edit". Change it to:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1;) Uptrends
After you have saved your settings, do the following:
- Log in to GA
- Click “Analytics Settings”
- Click “Filter Manager>>” (in the bottom-right corner of the page)
- Click “+ Add Filter”
- Name your filter (e.g. “Exclude Uptrends”)
- Choose “Custom filter”
- Filter Type: [Exclude]
- Filter Field select “Visitor Browser Program”
- Filter Pattern “.*Uptrends.*” (without the quotes)
- Case Sensitive: No
- Select your relevant website profile(s) from “Available Website Profiles” on the left, and choose the “Add” button to move them to the “Selected Website Profiles” area on the right
- Click “Save Changes”
…and that’s it, you’re done.
Please visit the full list of all our international checkpoints including their IP addresses.
The use of our whole monitoring network is totally free and part of every Uptrends edition. When an error occurs, we always verify that error by another checkpoint, to make sure it was a real error that you need to be alerted for. Furthermore, it can be possible that we schedule in maintenance for a specific checkpoint. In that case, you can be sure that your website is at least monitored by the other checkpoint. Ideally, we encourage every customer to use as much checkpoints they can, to get the most out of our service.