The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) monitors are among the uptime monitor types you can easily set up in no time. These monitors behave similarly, allowing you to check the availability of websites based on HTTP and HTTPS requests.
These monitors run basic checks on your http:// and https:// websites from designated
Checkpoints worldwide. These basic checks include verifying the website’s response status codes, page load time, and loading of content resources. That said, the HTTP and HTTPS monitors simply retrieve requested resources from the website. Its primary concern is to have an error-free response from the web server and confirm that your page is up and running. For more information, see
How an HTTP monitor works.
If you want to have in-depth monitor checks to measure the performance and system uptime of your website accurately, Uptrends recommends using a Full Page check. For more details, refer to the Basic checks versus Full Page check or Real-browser checks knowledge base article.
Set up an HTTP or HTTPS monitor
There is a minimal difference between setting up the Uptime HTTP monitor versus HTTPS monitors. As the HTTPS monitor is an extended and secured version of HTTP, this monitor includes an additional check to verify SSL certificate errors. To configure this setting, go to the Advanced tab of your monitor editor screen and check the Check SSL certificate errors checkbox option.
Enabling this option allows your HTTPS monitor to validate that the SSL certificate does not generate any errors. Only uncheck this option to ignore issues generated by your SSL certificate. If you wish to monitor your SSL certificates in-depth, refer to the SSL certificate monitor type to run further checks.
To create your own HTTP or HTTPS monitor, refer to Adding an HTTP or HTTPS monitor knowledge base article.
Advanced HTTP settings
To further customize your monitor setup, go to the Advanced tab of your HTTP or HTTPS monitor and configure the available settings.
TLS versions
The TLS version(s) lets you specify which versions of the TLS protocol can be negotiated during the handshake phase of an HTTP connection. By default, this setting is set to TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.1 since all Uptrends checkpoints support these versions.
HTTP version
The HTTP version lets you specify which HTTP version the checkpoint servers use when making requests. By default, this setting is set to Negotiate. This enables the client and server to automatically negotiate for the HTTP version to use, preferring HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.1.
To learn more about the advanced settings available for HTTPS monitors, refer to the Monitor settings article.