Uptrends Browser monitors, also known as Full Page Checks (FPC), are one of several monitor types Uptrends offers. They load your web page in a browser (Chrome or Microsoft Edge), collect detailed performance data for each individual page element, including scripts, stylesheets, images, and third-party resources. This element-level insight helps you understand how different components contribute to overall page performance and how your end users experience your website.
Browser monitors (Full Page Checks (FPC))
There are two types of FPCs that you can choose from:
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Full Page Check (FPC) — a monitor type that checks all the page’s elements upon page load and displays data in a comprehensive waterfall chart.
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Enhanced Full Page Check or Full Page Check (+FPC) — an option under the FPC monitor that checks all the page’s elements, including third-party content, upon page load. This monitor also displays your data in a comprehensive waterfall chart. For more details, see Enhanced Full Page Check.
Set up a Browser monitor
To set up a browser monitor, you need to create a monitor and configure its settings. For step-by-step instructions, see Create a monitor.
Browser monitor settings
After creating the monitor, configure its settings. Settings define how often the monitor runs, which error conditions trigger alerts, the browser used for the check (Chrome or Microsoft Edge), and what it measures.
The monitor results you see are based on the selected settings. Depending on the options you enable, the monitor can check the URLs (elements) loaded by the page, page load time, Core Web Vitals, W3C metrics, console content, and others. These checks are reflected in the monitor results, helping you understand how your website performs under real browsing conditions.
For more information on configuring monitor settings, see Monitor settings overview.
Monitor results
Browser monitors show monitoring information, including:
- Check details — contains general monitoring information and results based on the monitor type and its settings.
- Core Web Vitals — a set of key metrics defined by Google to measure the performance of your websites and identify improvements to score higher in search engine rankings.
- W3C Navigation Timing — a set of key metrics defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), including load event, request start, DOM behaviors, and others.
- Filmstrip (Timeline screenshots) — sequence of screenshots from the browser, showing exactly what the page looked like at different points during its loading process.
- Waterfall — a visual representation of the page load, for each individual element that was loaded.
- Page source — website’s raw structure in HTML format
- Console log — shows you messages or debugging information.
For more details, see Browser monitor results.
Monitor data and reporting
Once your monitor is set up and running (monitoring), you will start collecting data on performance. For each monitor check, a number of metrics are collected and stored. This data is shown in the monitor check details page. Go to Monitoring > Monitor log and click one of the list entries to open the check details.
Credits
Browser monitors use Browser credits to let you create and schedule monitors for execution. Uptrends uses credits to calculate the pricing for different monitoring services. For more information, refer to the credits knowledge base article.