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HTTP and HTTPS Monitors

The HTTP and HTTPS monitor types are pretty similar. The common behavior and settings will be discussed first, HTTPS specific information is provided further down on this page. If you want to know more about monitor checks and what happens when a problem is found, check out the knowledge base article linkname.

HTTP(S) monitors

An HTTP(S) monitor checks for your web pages' availability from the designated checkpoints located around the world. At the monitor’s most basic, the monitor checks for an error-free response from the web server. Beyond checking for basic website monitoring availability (or uptime monitoring), you can also monitor and trigger alerts for your page load times, minimum page size, content, and status codes. An HTTP(S) monitor is a “basic” check. Learn the difference between basic checks and real browser checks.

Please note that an HTTP(S) monitor downloads only the HTML content of a page. If you want to monitor all elements of a page (including stylesheets, scripts and images) Uptrends recommends using a Full Page Check.

Need help creating an HTTP(S) monitor? Jump over to the article Adding an HTTP(S) monitor for instructions.

Error conditions

You have several conditions you can check and trigger alerts for on your web page. From the Error conditions tab, you can set the page’s load time expectations, expected minimum page size, and set up content matching.

Please refer to the knowledge base article Error conditions for an overview of which error conditions exist for which monitor and more detail on each of them.

Advanced HTTP settings

With the basic HTTP monitor, you can expand the check by declaring a user agent, use basic authentication, and define HTTP Requests on the Advanced tab.

User agent

Do you want to test your web page with specific browsers? Using the User Agent settings you can choose between 15 different commonly used browsers or you can create a custom agent. Please note that this only sends the chosen User Agent along with the request. As such, Uptrends does not actually monitor the site in a browser. If you want to monitor a single page in a real browser, please use a Full Page Check.

Authenticate users

If your page requires user authentication, you can provide a username and password to verify that your authentication processes work correctly. Learn how Uptrends uses encryption to keep your authentication information safe.

Custom HTTP requests

The basic HTTP monitor uses a “get” header, but you can test the post headers as well. You can also create and test your own custom HTTP request headers. Read on in Monitoring websites other than the production server for instructions on how to set this up.

HTTPS

The HTTPS monitor type checks for the availability of a web page secured by an SSL certificate. The monitor includes all of the checks and options you get with HTTP monitoring and in addition you get SSL certificate checking.

SSL certificate checks

Invalid and expired SSL certificate warnings turn away users. To prevent this situation turn on SSL certificate checks by activating Check SSL certificate errors on the Advanced tab of the HTTPS monitor.

Keep in mind that this is a simple check of the validity of an SSL certificate and its certificate chain. If you want more options, use an additional monitor of type SSL certificate to run further checks.

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