Website Monitoring Overview
Website Monitoring is UptimeDock's core service that continuously checks your websites from multiple locations around the world. It detects downtime, measures response times, and alerts you immediately when issues occur—ensuring you're always the first to know about problems before your users do.
What is Website Monitoring?
Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that your websites and web applications are accessible, performing well, and functioning correctly. UptimeDock performs these checks automatically at configurable intervals, from as frequently as every 30 seconds to once per hour.
With UptimeDock's Website Monitoring, you get comprehensive coverage including:
- Uptime monitoring – Verify your website is accessible and responding to HTTP/HTTPS requests
- Response time tracking – Measure how quickly your server responds to requests
- Multi-region verification – Test from multiple geographic locations to detect regional outages
- Instant alerts – Get notified via email, SMS, Slack, webhooks, and more when issues are detected
- Historical reporting – Access detailed logs and analytics for performance analysis
How It Works
Monitoring Process
When you create a website monitoring check, UptimeDock begins monitoring your site using the following process:
- Request initiation – At each check interval, our monitoring agents send an HTTP/HTTPS request to your website URL
- Response analysis – We analyze the response including status code, response time, and content
- Status determination – Based on configurable criteria, we determine if your site is up or down
- Verification (optional) – If a failure is detected, another agent from a different region can verify the outage to prevent false positives
- Alert dispatch – When a confirmed issue is detected, alerts are sent through your configured notification channels
Enable "Verify down from another agent" to reduce false positives. When this option is enabled, a second monitoring agent from a different region will confirm the outage before triggering an alert.
Global Monitoring Network
UptimeDock operates monitoring agents across multiple geographic regions. This distributed architecture provides several benefits:
- Geographic coverage – Monitor how your site performs for users in different regions
- Regional outage detection – Identify issues that only affect specific geographic areas
- CDN validation – Verify your CDN is serving content correctly from all edge locations
- Redundant monitoring – Multiple vantage points ensure reliable monitoring even if one region has connectivity issues
| Region | Locations |
|---|---|
| United States | Virginia, California, Oregon, Ohio |
| Europe | Dublin (Ireland), Paris (France), Stockholm (Sweden), Milan (Italy) |
Available Features
Website Monitoring in UptimeDock is modular—you can enable multiple features for a single check to get comprehensive monitoring coverage. Each feature provides specialized monitoring capabilities.
Uptime Monitoring
The core feature that monitors your website's availability and response time. This is enabled by default for all website monitoring checks.
- Monitors HTTP/HTTPS endpoints
- Tracks response time for each request
- Validates HTTP status codes
- Supports custom HTTP methods (GET, POST, HEAD, etc.)
- Optional screenshot capture for each check
Performance Monitoring
Goes beyond basic uptime to analyze page load performance and identify slow-loading elements.
- Detect slow-loading images and resources
- Measure Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- Track DOM content loaded time
- Get alerts when performance degrades beyond thresholds
Performance monitoring uses a real browser to load your page, which provides more accurate performance data but consumes more resources. Consider this when setting check frequencies for performance monitoring.
Transaction Monitoring
Monitor multi-step user flows like login forms, checkout processes, and other interactive website functionality.
- Validate form submissions and authentication flows
- Monitor multi-page user journeys
- Detect broken forms before users encounter them
- Measure transaction completion time
SSL Certificate Monitoring
Monitors your SSL/TLS certificates and alerts you before they expire or when issues are detected.
- Track certificate expiration dates
- Get alerts days/weeks before expiration
- Detect certificate chain issues
- Validate certificate configuration
An expired SSL certificate will cause browsers to display security warnings, potentially driving away visitors and damaging trust. Enable SSL monitoring to ensure you're always notified before certificates expire.
Domain Expiration Monitoring
Monitors your domain registration and alerts you when it's nearing expiration.
- Track domain registration expiry dates
- Get early alerts to ensure renewal
- Prevent accidental domain loss
- Monitor multiple domains from a single check
Monitoring Configuration
Website monitoring checks can be customized with various configuration options to match your specific requirements.
Check Frequency
Choose how often UptimeDock checks your website. More frequent checks provide faster detection but consume more of your monitoring quota.
| Frequency | Use Case |
|---|---|
| Every 30 seconds | Critical production systems requiring fastest detection |
| Every 1 minute | High-priority websites and APIs |
| Every 5 minutes | Standard monitoring for most websites |
| Every 15-60 minutes | Lower-priority or development environments |
Monitor Regions
Select which geographic regions should monitor your website. You can choose specific regions or select all available regions for comprehensive global coverage.
- Single region – Suitable for location-specific services or cost optimization
- Multiple regions – Recommended for global services to detect regional issues
- All regions – Maximum coverage for mission-critical applications
Verification Options
Configure how UptimeDock handles detected issues:
- Verify down from another agent – When enabled, a second agent confirms the outage before alerting, reducing false positives from network issues
- Enable simultaneous monitoring – All selected regions check at the same time, providing parallel performance comparison
- Save screenshot of page – Capture a screenshot with each check for visual verification and debugging
For production websites, we recommend enabling "Verify down from another agent" to minimize alert fatigue from false positives caused by temporary network issues.
Reporting & Analytics
UptimeDock provides comprehensive reporting and analytics for your website monitoring checks, giving you insights into performance trends and historical uptime data.
Response Time Metrics
The response time chart displays your website's performance over time with key statistics:
- Minimum response time – The fastest response recorded in the selected period
- Maximum response time – The slowest response, helping identify performance spikes
- Average response time – The mean response time across all checks
- Visual timeline – Interactive chart showing response time trends
Uptime History
View detailed logs of every check performed, including:
- Region – Which monitoring location performed the check
- Timestamp – When the check was performed
- Result – Up or Down status
- Response time – How long the request took
- Details – Full response headers, status codes, and captured screenshots
Filter the history by status (Up/Down) to quickly find and analyze issues.
Outages & Incidents
The outages panel provides a high-level view of your website's availability history:
- Uptime percentage – Your overall uptime rate for the selected period
- Outage timeline – Visual representation of up/down periods
- Incident details – Start time, end time, and duration of each outage
- Status types – Up, Down, Paused, and Maintenance windows
Schedule maintenance windows to prevent alerts during planned downtime. Maintenance periods are tracked separately and don't affect your uptime percentage calculations.