Uptime Robot can already check the status of servers/devices who have public IPs with its ping and port monitoring feature.
Yet, there are many other servers/computers/devices that are inside an intranet (but connected to the internet) and need to be monitored.
Heartbeat monitoring
It is now possible to monitor such endpoints using heartbeat monitoring.
The feature works in an opposite way compared to other monitoring types.
Uptime Robot provides a unique URL for each heartbeat monitor created and expects the monitored item to send regular requests to this URL.
Once a regular request doesn’t arrive on time, the monitor is marked as down.
Heartbeat monitoring is not only ideal for monitoring servers/computers inside an intranet but also a great fit for monitoring the health of the regular/cron jobs your website/app may be performing.
As an example, if your app runs a cron job which deletes the old logs every 10 minutes, you can update the code to send a HTTP request to the heartbeat monitor’s URL once that cron job is ran and know that the cron job may be having problems if the heartbeat monitor is down.
How to use the feature?
Heartbeat monitoring is available in the Pro Plan and it works with steps:
- Create a new heartbeat monitor using the Add New Monitor dialog
- Get the URL of the heartbeat monitor created in the same dialog
- Setup a cron job (or a scheduled task in Windows) that sends an HTTP request to this heartbeat URL every x minutes (where x is the interval selected for the monitor)
- That is it.
Alternatively, please check the docs for creating cron jobs in Unix/Linux and scheduled tasks in Windows.
P.S> The feature is in beta status and look forward to any feedback/suggestions.
