Monitoring web site uptime

Monitoring website uptime is an important part of any website maintenance workflow. Critically, it notifies you of any downtime events so they can be resolved quickly. 

At Watchful, you will need a Watchful Premium to use uptime monitoring.

Viewing uptime data

Uptime monitors are created automatically when you add a site to your Premium account. Follow these steps to view the status of an uptime monitor:

1. Find the site in question in your sites dashboard.
2. Click the site name to open the site drawer.
3. Click the uptime link. 

This will open an uptime modal that looks similar to the:

Adding an uptime monitor

If your site does not have an active uptime monitor, follow these steps to create one:

1. Find the site in question in your sites dashboard.
2. Click the site name to open the site drawer.
3. Click the create uptime monitor link as shown below. 

Delete an uptime monitor

Sometimes it is necessary to delete an uptime monitor (when troubleshooting for example). To delete a monitor: 

1. Find the site in question in your sites dashboard.
2. Click the site name to open the site drawer.
3. Click on the uptime link to reveal the uptime modal.
4. In the uptime modal, click the delete button at the bottom-right (see image above). 

Pause uptime monitoring

If you are performing heavy site maintenance, it is common to receive many notifications that a site is offline or down. This can be annoying, and can also negatively impact uptime statistics.    

In this situation, it may be desirable to pause uptime notifications until maintenance is complete. To pause uptime monitoring for a site while retaining the uptime history:

1. Find the site in question in the sites dashboard.
2. Click the site name to open the site drawer.
3. Click the uptime link  to open an uptime modal as shown above.
4. Click the pause monitor button.
5. To resume monitoring, click the resume monitor button as shown below.

Ensure your full site is loading

By following the instructions above, you can reliably track whether or not your web server (eg. Apache) is returning an ok status. However, that doesn't mean the desired content is being displayed.

To check that your web site is fully loading, it is better to make a request to the server for a web page and check that a specific word in the footer of your site is returned in the source code of your web site. 

By checking for a single word that loads near the end of your home page, you will know that most or all of the page has loaded normally. For example, if we were monitoring watchful.net we might select "Privacy Policy" since this appears in the footer of the homepage. 

Follow these steps to configure uptime monitoring to check for a specific word:

1. Select an appropriate word or phrase near the bottom of your website homepage.
2. Find the site in question in your sites dashboard.
3. Click the edit link to open the edit site modal.
4. In the edit site modal, locate the Word to check field and enter the word you chose in Step 1.
5. Select the Save button to confirm the change and start monitoring this word on your homepage.

Managing uptime monitors in bulk

To create or delete the uptime monitors across multiple sites, we recommend the bulk actions menu on the sites dashboard. 

1. From the sites dashboard, select the desired sites on the left.
2. Click the bulk actions menu at the top-left.
3. Choose create uptime monitor or delete uptime monitor as needed. 

Troubleshooting uptime monitoring

If you are having issues with uptime monitoring, please review the dedicated troubleshooting document.