New feature spotlight: Advanced keyword based uptime monitoring

Today we are pleased to announce the launch our very first advanced monitor designed to catch issues traditional uptime monitoring solutions just can’t see.🎉

Standard uptime monitors are great to get notified when a page or service doesn’t return a 200 header response (meaning that the page or service is working). But there are edge cases where page errors are cached or issues affecting the page causing content or elements not to work but still returning a 200 “I’m ok” response.

These types of errors are usually defined as soft 404 error and they are typically difficult to diagnose as the page itself returns a 200 header response meaning all is fine.

Catch database connection issues

Database connection issues can cause errors within a page but still return a 200 header response meaning all is fine, as a result most monitoring services are blind to the problem.

Spot errors within a page

Server resource timeouts and 3rd party plugins or services breaking can also cause errors within a page but return a normal page header response. This can be difficult to spot and usually the first sign of these is from a customer reporting the problem, not an ideal scenario.

Identify cached error pages

Server or cache misconfigurations can cause error pages to be cached and served with a 200 header response, making these difficult to catch.

Get peace of mind with our new Advanced uptime monitor

If you have an Advanced and above level plan you now have access to our new Advanced monitor! This enables you to check for uptime and check for the presence or absence of a key phrase, so you can catch these difficult to spot issues. 🎯

Here is how it works:

First, choose the page you want to monitor (for example your homepage). Then specify a keyword or phrase to look out for (for example: “error” or “timeout”).
Then if this keyword appears on page or the page goes down you will get notified of the situation, now that’s peace of mind.