Interval and the traffic we send
A Monitor’s Interval is how often each of its locations checks it. A shorter interval notices an outage sooner, and sends your server more requests.
Choosing an interval
Section titled “Choosing an interval”- A Monitor can run as often as every 30 seconds, on every Plan, Free included.
- Its interval is 1 minute unless you change it.
- A Website Monitor whose method is
POST,PUT,PATCHorDELETEmay change data in your system on each run, so it runs no more often than every 15 minutes. Choosing one of those methods moves a shorter interval up to it. Website and API Monitors says what such a Monitor costs.
A Heartbeat Monitor has no interval of ours: your job calls us, and we send nothing.
The traffic we send
Section titled “The traffic we send”Each location checks the Monitor on its own schedule, so the requests add up: every location sends one request each interval. A Monitor with 5 locations at the fastest interval, every 30 seconds, sends your server 10 requests a minute.
What one Monitor sends in a day, by its number of locations and its interval:
| Requests a day | Every 30 seconds | Every 1 minute | Every 15 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 location | 2,880 | 1,440 | 96 |
| 3 locations | 8,640 | 4,320 | 288 |
| 5 locations | 14,400 | 7,200 | 480 |
For a Port Monitor, a request here is one connection, opened and closed. For a Server Monitor, it is one run of its few pings.
Add up your Monitors on one server to see what it receives. When a server has a rate limit, leave room for this traffic, or exempt it.
What the counts leave out
Section titled “What the counts leave out”A few requests come only now and then, and are not in the table:
- When a run fails, we try again, and ask other locations to check too, before we tell you anything. A failure brings a few more requests, and only while something is wrong. How a failure is confirmed says how.
- When you save a Monitor that needs a test, one location sends its request once.
- On an https Website Monitor with the Certificate Check on, one location reads the certificate every 6 hours. That opens a connection, and asks for no page.
Finding our requests in your logs
Section titled “Finding our requests in your logs”Every request of a Website Monitor carries our User-Agent, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; uup/1.0; +https://uup.dev/probe), and an x-uup-check header. Filter on either to find our checks in your logs, or to leave them out of your analytics. How we measure says what each run records.