What’s Next For Uptime Robot?
January 24th, 2013
It has been 3 years since Uptime Robot has launched.
The service taught us a lot about scaling, advanced HTTP and managing a widely-used product. We saw that no two sites, servers or networks are the same and learned how to deal with them all.
We try hard to make it stay simple-yet-functional, improve the engine and provide premium-like support. Lately, we have been working hard on few things (that’s why we didn’t push new features for a while). So, what’s next?
A totally new engine with “second-perfect monitoring”
If you have ever dug the HTTP logs of your site, you may have realized that Uptime Robot is not always checking sites in 5 mins strictly. It is sometimes 5 mins 10 seconds, sometimes, 5 mins 50 seconds and when there is load (on network, etc.), this can change even few minutes.
We have spent the last few months on rewriting the monitoring engine completely with a better technology, testing the new engine now and will activate it within a week.
Although this sounds like a technical detail, it will completely change the stability and capability of Uptime Robot.
Monitors will be checked almost second perfect, downtimes will be detected much better and it will help us to add more features with ease.
Uptime Robot v2
The new engine mentioned was our first step to v2. We are also working on a completely revamped interface.
Again simple but much better and many more new features (response time monitoring and reports are some of them).
There are few months left for launching it.
Will it stay free?
Well, no decisions to make it paid.
We tried many ways to monetize it (sponsors, ads, etc.) and experienced that they are all short term. For today, we are “ok” with compensating the costs. If one day we feel that this financing model threatens its future, that may be the time for premium plans. So, as far as we know, still free 
.
Posted in Announcements | 164 Comments »
A Change In RSS Notification Addresses
November 7th, 2012
Many of the Uptime Robot users are enjoying the RSS notification feature which allows “anyone (with your unique RSS address)” to view all up/down events of your account via RSS.
Some developers use this for integrating the events to their websites and others add the feed to their RSS readers to see any events from there.
In order to make RSS notifications better work with out being improved and distributed monitoring engine, we have made few changes to it.
It now became too much stable but, most importantly, the RSS addresses have changed.
The new RSS addresses can again be found at the same place (My Monitors page). If you use it, make sure you get the new URL.
P.S. The old addresses will still be active until 15 Nov 2012.
Tags: RSS
Posted in Announcements | 11 Comments »
New Ip Address In Town
June 27th, 2012
The number of users utilizing Uptime Robot is regularly growing and, in order to fulfill this growth, a new monitoring engine will be added to the system by this Monday (2 July 2012).
If you never needed to whitelist Uptime Robot’s IPs to make the monitoring work correctly, than it is ok to ignore this message as things will keep working ok.
However, if your monitors/websites are behind a firewall where you need to whitelist the IPs, the new IP is: 74.86.158.107.
And, you can find the full list of IPs being used at: http://www.uptimerobot.com/about.asp .
Have a great day!
Posted in Announcements | 15 Comments »
New Features – Bulk Actions & IPv6 Support
May 28th, 2012
It is possible to add many monitors to Uptime Robot and get notified of any downtime (and uptime).
However, there can be times where you may want to bulk stop them (like during a server restart) . You can do that now. With few clicks, you can stop, start or delete all monitors.
The “Bulk Actions” menu is found in the “My Monitors” page just under the “Add New” button.
IPv6 Support
More and more websites are starting to have IPv6 support and Uptime Robot can now monitor IPv6 addresses.
Either the complete IPv6 address or any compressed versions like:
- fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
- fe80:0:0:0:202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
- fe80::202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
are all supported.
Minor New Feature: Sorting monitors.
You may have already realized but, few weeks ago, a small feature was added which is the “ability to sort monitors by name or status“.
This is specially good to view any “down” monitors at the top of your list (when you have many monitors).
That’s all : ).
Tags: IPv6
Posted in Announcements | 22 Comments »
Small Update (Many Bug Fixes, Optimizations..)
May 14th, 2012
New posts are usually added once a new feature is added and Its been a while since a new feature is introduced.
For the last few months, we were heavily optimizing the engine, notifications, API usage and fixing small bugs to handle the growth.
Things were already working good but we want to make sure they stay stable and we have improved many stuff in the backend.
Also, lately, we are busy working on few other exciting things: widgets to display uptime in websites and reports. And, they will soon be available.
As the title says, just a small update on the “progress” of Uptime Robot.
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Getting Uptime Ratios Of Any Period Via API – Now Possible!
January 9th, 2012
Since the release of the API, the “all time uptime ratio” for each monitor is provided by default.
Many users have asked for the ability to get weekly and/or monthly uptime ratios to integrate more values into their websites/apps.
Today, we have added a new variable to the getMonitors method which can return the uptime ratio of any given period.
It can provide values back to 2 months (this is how long the logs are kept for).
The new feature is smart enough to return the ratios of multiple intervals in a single API call.
In order to use it, just add: customUptimeRatio=7 to the getMonitors request for getting the 7 days uptime. Or you can go with customUptimeRatio=7-30-60 to get uptime ratios of all 3 days.
To learn more about the usage, just check the getMonitors method in the API docs.
Tags: API
Posted in Announcements | 22 Comments »
New API Methods & Updates (About Alert Contacts)
December 12th, 2011
With the release of monitor-specific alert contacts, the API is updated accordingly and also gained some new methods.
Updates
alertContactIDs should be sent when creating or editing monitors to define which alert contacts to be notified of up/down eventsgetMonitorsmethod can now return the alert contacts of a monitor with addingshowMonitorAlertContacts=1to the querystring
New Methods
There are 3 new methods and the names define their functionality well:
getAlertContacts
newAlertContact
deleteAlertContact
The API documentation is updated with all the new information
Tags: API
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
New Feature – Each Monitor Can Have Different Alert Contacts
December 12th, 2011
Once a monitor is detected as down (and back up), Uptime Robot was sending notifications to all alert contacts defined in the “My Settings” page.. until today.
We have rolled an exciting update today where you can assign different alert contacts for each monitor.
Let’s say:
- you have 10 monitors, 3 of them are your own websites and others belong to customers. And, you want Uptime Robot to notify your customers for “only” the up/down events of their websites,
- you want to notify the web developer when your company website goes down and notify the IT admin when e-mails server don’t work.
These are all possible now.
How to use it?
Alert contacts are still defined to your account from the “My Settings” page. After that, they can be selected per monitor from the “add and edit monitor” dialogs.
What about my current alert contact settings?
We have assigned your alert contacts to your monitors accordingly. So, everything will keep working how they were.
If you prefer to change the alert contacts of a monitor, simply click the “edit” icon besides it and you’ll see how easy it is.
Did these updates change effect the API?
Yes. There are now new methods and features reflecting the changes. Another blog post is coming about it within a few hours.
Posted in Announcements | 14 Comments »
Monitor-Specific apiKeys & Improvements On API
November 16th, 2011
Since the launch of the API ~a month ago, we are so excited to see many users integrating Uptime Robot ratios to their websites or auto-creating/deleting monitors from their apps.
Also, several wrappers and code samples are shared which eases consuming the “easy-to-use” API more.
As you know, the standard Uptime Robot apiKey can pull and push data for every monitor in an account. You can create create monitors, edit or delete them. But, what if you need to use the API that pulls data from your account but displays it inside a client’s website? Revealing the apiKey would be a security issue.
Monitor-specific apiKeys
A new type of apiKey comes to the rescue: monitor-specific apiKeys are now added to the system which enables pulling data of “only” a given monitor.
Each monitor can have their own apiKey and they are locked to use the getMonitors API method only for that monitor.
That is specially functional for web agencies and freelancers controlling multiple clients websites from their own Uptime Robotaccounts.
Improvements
The getMonitors method now returns:
- monitorURL (can’t find a good reason why this wasn’t in the initial release : ))
- httpusername and httppassword (as monitoring password-protected websites is now possible)
Tighter integration for web apps
If you have a web application/service and looking for a tighter integration with Uptime Robot (like creating users via API), please feel free to contact us at support@uptimerobot.com for more details.
That’s all for now : ).
Tags: API
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
New Feature: Monitoring Password-Protected Websites
October 26th, 2011
The websites or web pages preferring to stay private and having a password (Basic access authentication), normally returns HTTP 401 status which ends up being marked as “down” by Uptime Robot.
Uptime Robot now has support for monitoring password-protected websites by optionally mentioning the username-password in the monitor’s settings.
The feature exists for both HTTP and Keyword monitors and can be found in the “optional settings” link of “Add New and Edit Monitor dialogs”.
P.S. The API requests, responses and documentation are updated accordingly.
TECH INFO 