Troubleshooting uptime monitoring

If you are having difficulties obtaining accurate uptime information, or experience excessive uptime/downtime alerts, please review the instructions for using this feature.

If you still have problems, try the following solutions.

1. Make sure you have a paid plan in the account area of Watchful. Free plans are not able to monitor uptime.
2. Make sure your site is connecting normally to Watchful. If not, please review our troubleshooting connection problems guide.
3. Be sure that your domain name in Watchful site settings matches EXACTLY the address of your website, especially in regards to the use of www and https vs. http in the url.
4. Be sure the Word to Check option in your site details is spelled correct. If you are unsure about this, remove the Word to Check until the problem is resolved.
5. Be sure the Word to Check exists on the homepage of your site.
6. If you are using a phrase in the Word to Check option, choose a single word instead.
7. Whitelist the Watchful IP addresses as described here. You may need to contact your hosting provider for this.
8. Whitelist the following user agent: WebsiteOps (websiteops.io). You may need to contact your hosting provider for this.
9. Make sure the DNS entries for your domain has propagated properly around the world.
   1. Visit dnschecker.org.
   2. Enter your domain name and click the Search button. 
   3. Review the results. Your domain should return your current server IP address for all locations. 
   4. If one or more locations do not return your IP address, or return any IP address, contact your host or domain name registrar to resolve this issue.
10. Delete and then create a new uptime monitor for your site. Instructions for adding and removing uptime monitors can be found here. 
    1. Note that you will lose your uptime history for a given site when deleting and adding a new uptime monitor.

Status codes

Watchful may report the exact HTTP status code for a website. This may be helpful in troubleshooting the problem. 

Below are some common error codes. For full details, please review all of the codes here. 

• 200 - This is the standard “OK” status code indicating that your site is up.
• 301 - This code means that the URL has been "moved permanently". This often happens when redirecting traffic for SEO purposes.
• 401 or 403 - These codes mean that the URL requested is returning an unauthorized or forbidden error. This often happens when a firewall is blocking the connection to Watchful.
• 404 - This code means that the URL cannot be found. 
• 500 - This code means than an internal server error has occurred.