Website uptime monitoring, from the outside.

A website can work on your laptop while customers elsewhere see an error. External monitoring checks your public website from independent locations and keeps a record of what happened.

What does an uptime monitor check?

AOD Pulse requests your public HTTP or HTTPS URL every minute from your selected locations. Your dashboard shows check results, response times, regional differences, and incidents. HTTPS checks validate the certificate presented by the site. Your dashboard shows the earliest certificate expiry among the newest available selected-location observations of the final HTTPS response. In Edit website → Advanced settings, you can enable certificate reminder emails and choose up to five warning thresholds between 1 and 90 days. Defaults are 30, 14, and 7 days. Reminders use your selected verified recipients, wait during maintenance, and are suppressed when fresh evidence shows renewal. These are separate from outage alerts; no fresh certificate evidence means no new expiry warning.

A successful HTTP response is useful evidence that a page is reachable. It does not prove that a checkout, login, search form, or every image works. Those tasks require browser transaction monitoring, which the public Pulse product does not yet offer.

Define a healthy response

Advanced settings support GET or HEAD, expected HTTP status codes, a request timeout of one to 15 seconds, and case-sensitive required or forbidden text. Content checks use GET and inspect the first 256 KiB of the response. Redirects are followed and the final response is checked. Changing check rules starts a new configuration revision; historical results stay available.

Plan maintenance and export evidence

Schedule a maintenance period from a monitor’s Maintenance button. Checks continue, covered minutes are labeled maintenance and excluded from observed uptime and coverage, and email delivery is held. Existing incidents are not automatically marked recovered. CSV export downloads the monitor’s retained 30-day window history. Choose one-off periods or up to five weekly schedules per monitor. Select weekdays (all seven for daily), a time zone, and 1–1440 elapsed minutes. Preview upcoming dates, skip one occurrence, or cancel a series. A start time skipped by daylight saving is skipped that day; a repeated time runs once at its first occurrence.

Start with five important websites

1. Create an account and verify your email.
2. Add a public website that you own or have permission to monitor. Choose a page whose availability matters to visitors.
3. Select your monitoring locations. All five are selected by default for a new monitor.
4. Add and verify any custom alert contacts, then assign them to the appropriate monitor.
5. Review the first completed checks and confirm that your firewall permits the monitoring requests.

The promotional plan includes five monitors, including paused monitors, at no charge and with no credit card. It supports public HTTP/HTTPS sites on ports 80 and 443. Private networks, authenticated requests, custom headers, and URLs with query strings or fragments are not supported.

Choose checks around your work

Understand the numbers

Response time measures the monitoring request, not a visitor’s full page load. Observed uptime describes completed observations; coverage tells you whether expected checks arrived. Missing observations are not proof of either success or downtime. Pulse keeps detailed samples for 24 hours and aggregate history for 30 days.

How quickly will an email arrive?

Checks run every minute. By default, an outage is confirmed when all selected locations fail in two complete consecutive check windows; recovery requires two complete successful windows. Advanced settings let you choose one to five failed or healthy windows. This is not instant alerting: allow roughly 2–5 minutes for confirmation and delivery in normal operation. Regional disagreement is shown as degraded, and incomplete evidence can remain unknown.

You can publish an optional status page from your dashboard, with chosen public labels and optional history. Need sub-minute checks or browser transactions now? Review the monitoring comparison before choosing a service. Higher-capacity paid Pulse plans are planned, not available for purchase today.