Question 1

What is uptime monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Uptime monitoring is the continuous automated checking of a website or web application to verify it is available and responding correctly. A monitoring service sends HTTP or HTTPS requests to the target URL on a regular schedule (typically every 30 seconds to 5 minutes), records the response status code and the time it took to respond, and compares the result against expected criteria. When a check fails or response time exceeds a threshold, the monitor sends an alert through configured channels — email, Telegram, Slack, webhooks, or a combination. The goal is to catch downtime and performance regressions within 60 seconds so the team can respond before users are affected.

Question 2

Is there a free uptime monitoring service for Europe?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Upsonar runs European monitoring nodes in London (UK) and Amsterdam (Netherlands), two of the 8 locations in its global check network. The free Echo plan includes 3 monitors with 5-minute check intervals and one check location per monitor, so a European team can point every monitor at London or Amsterdam; Pulse watches from up to 3 locations at once and Wave from up to 6. Alerts go to email and Telegram with no credit card required. This is a real choice for European teams who want low-latency checks from the same continent as their infrastructure without paying for a commercial plan.

Question 3

How often should a website be checked for uptime?

Accepted Answer

At least every 5 minutes for production sites. A longer interval (15-60 minutes) saves money but means an outage can run for up to an hour before anyone knows — unacceptable for anything customer-facing. A shorter interval catches incidents faster but costs more and produces more noise. Upsonar's free Echo plan checks every 5 minutes; Pulse and Wave check every minute. Every plan verifies a failure from a second location before alerting, so even a 5-minute interval produces meaningful data. How many locations a monitor checks from depends on the plan: 1 on Echo, up to 3 on Pulse, up to 6 on Wave.

Question 4

How often does Upsonar check my website?

Accepted Answer

Check frequency depends on the plan: the free Echo plan checks every 5 minutes, while Pulse and Wave check every minute. Each monitor checks from every region you assign it simultaneously — a Pulse monitor watching 3 regions generates 3 checks per minute, not one. Region allowances are 1 on the free Echo plan, up to 3 on Pulse, and up to 6 on Wave, out of 8 locations. This is important because multi-region verification requires data from multiple locations in parallel, not sequentially.

Question 5

What is multi-region monitoring and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Multi-region monitoring means checking a website from multiple geographic locations simultaneously rather than from a single server. It matters because many outages are regional: a CDN edge node can fail in Asia while working fine in Europe, a DNS propagation bug can break a site for Brazilian users for 15 minutes, a BGP routing issue can isolate one continent from another, and geo-blocking misconfigurations can silently lock out entire countries. Single-location monitors miss these failures entirely because the one location they check from is usually fine. Upsonar runs monitoring nodes in 8 locations — New York, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Bangalore, Sydney — and each monitor checks from the ones you assign it: 1 on the free Echo plan, up to 3 on Pulse, up to 6 on Wave. Assign more than one and a regional split shows up in the results directly, within 60 seconds. On every plan, including the free one, a failed check is re-verified from a different location before any alert is sent.

Question 6

How does Upsonar prevent false alerts?

Accepted Answer

When a check fails from one region, Upsonar immediately re-verifies from other regions before sending an alert. If the failure is confirmed from at least two locations, an incident is created and notifications are sent. If only the original region fails and every other region is fine, the event is logged as a regional flap and no alert is sent. This eliminates the most common source of false positives in uptime monitoring — transient network hiccups at a single check location — without sacrificing genuine regional-outage detection.

Question 7

What happens when my site goes down?

Accepted Answer

When downtime is detected and confirmed from multiple regions, Upsonar creates an incident automatically with full diagnostics: the HTTP response code that failed, which regions confirmed the failure, response times from each region, any failing external resources on the page, and the exact timestamp of the first failed check. Alerts are sent instantly through every configured channel (email, Telegram, Slack, custom webhook) with a direct link to the incident. Monitoring continues during the outage, and a recovery notification is sent when the site is confirmed back up from every region. The incident is closed automatically and includes the full timeline for post-mortem analysis.

Question 8

Can I monitor APIs, not just websites?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Upsonar can monitor any HTTP or HTTPS endpoint — websites, REST APIs, GraphQL endpoints, JSON APIs, XML feeds, webhook receivers, and any other HTTP service. The monitor checks the response status code by default and can optionally verify response body content for content-based health checks. API monitoring works exactly the same way as website monitoring — the same choice of check locations (1 on Echo, up to 3 on Pulse, up to 6 on Wave, out of 8 worldwide), the same re-verification from another location before an alert is sent, and the same full diagnostics on failure.

Question 9

Can I monitor authenticated APIs with custom headers?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Upsonar supports custom HTTP headers on availability monitors, which lets you monitor endpoints that require authentication. You can add an Authorization header (Bearer token, API key, Basic Auth), any custom headers your API requires, or any combination. Headers are sent with every check request from every region. Custom header values are masked in check results and audit logs so tokens and API keys are never visible to other team members or support staff. Custom headers are available on the Pulse and Wave plans.

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