--- title: Add a monitor description: Watch a website or API endpoint and learn within minutes when it goes down, slows down or serves the wrong page. section: title: Guides order: 2 order: 1 lastUpdated: 2026-10-31 next: ["/docs/guides/choose-who-gets-alerted", "/docs/concepts/http-monitors"] keywords: [ "http monitor", "website monitor", "check", "ping", "uptime check", "health check", "ssl", "keyword", ] --- An HTTP monitor requests one URL on a schedule and records whether it answered as expected. For DNS records, open ports, scheduled jobs and multi-step sign-ins, see [Understanding Monitors](/docs/concepts/monitors). Open HTTP Monitors in the sidebar and click Create Monitor. Under **Basics**, fill in Monitor Name and URL to Monitor. Use the full address, including `https://`. A health-check route such as `/healthz` makes a better target than a page that changes often. Under **Check settings**: - Check Interval: from 1 to 60 minutes, 10 by default. - Expected Status Code: the code a healthy response returns, `200 OK` by default. Redirects are followed, so this is the code of the page the URL finally lands on. - Region: where the checks run from. Each monitor runs from one region; to watch from several, add a monitor per region. Click Create Monitor. The first check runs immediately, and the monitor's page opens with the result. ## What up, degraded and down mean | Status | When | | -------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Up | The status code matches, every content check passes, and the response took under 5 seconds | | Degraded | Everything matches, but the response took 5 seconds or longer | | Down | No response within 10 seconds, a different status code, or a content check that failed | Both degraded and down send alerts. See [Choose who gets alerted](/docs/guides/choose-who-gets-alerted). ## Optional: check what the page says A page can return `200 OK` and still be broken: an empty template, an error message, a maintenance notice. Content checks read the response body on every check. 1. Open the monitor and click Edit Monitor. 2. In **Content Monitoring**, choose a Check Type: Contains, Does Not Contain or Regex Pattern. 3. Type the text or pattern in Value, tick Case sensitive matching if case matters, and click Add Check. The monitor is down whenever any of its checks fails. ## Optional: watch the SSL certificate 1. Open the monitor and click Edit Monitor. 2. In **SSL certificate monitoring**, turn on Enable SSL Monitoring. 3. Set Alert Before Expiry to how many days of warning you want (30 by default). 4. Click Save SSL settings. Leave Certificate Expiry Date empty and Uptime reads the date from public Certificate Transparency logs every day. Type a date only for a certificate that never appears there, such as one from a private CA. Not from the form. New monitors send `HEAD` requests with a 10-second timeout and a 5-second degraded threshold. Adding a content check switches the request to `GET`, since the body is needed. To set `method`, `timeoutSeconds` (1 to 60) or `degradedAfterMs` (1,000 to 30,000), update the monitor through the [HTTP Monitors API](/docs/api/resources/http-monitors). Not with an HTTP monitor. To check an endpoint that needs a token, write a [flow monitor](/docs/guides/check-a-sign-in-flow) that signs in first. Every check is one ping. The $5 monthly subscription includes 100,000 pings; past that, each block of 10,000 pings costs $1. A monitor checking every minute uses 43,200 pings in a 30-day month, and one checking every 10 minutes uses 4,320. It may. Every check is signed with Web Bot Auth, so your firewall can allow it by verifying the signature instead of matching IP addresses. See [Recognizing Uptime's Checks](/docs/concepts/http-monitors#recognizing-uptimes-checks).