Uptime Monitoring & SSL Certificate Checks

Betterlytics includes built-in uptime monitoring and SSL certificate checks that continuously verify your website’s availability and alert you when something goes wrong. No additional tools or integrations are required, monitoring is built directly into your analytics dashboard.

What We Monitor

Each monitor performs HTTP checks on your configured URL and tracks:

• Uptime status: Whether your site is responding successfully
• Response time (latency): How long it takes your server to respond
• SSL certificate health: Expiration date and certificate validity
• Incident history: Timeline of downtime events and their causes

Uptime monitoring continuously checks whether your website or API endpoints are reachable and responding correctly over time.

Creating a Monitor

1. Navigate to Dashboard > Monitoring
2. Click Create Monitor
3. Enter the URL you want to monitor (must be on your dashboard’s domain)
4. Configure timing, alerts, and advanced settings
5. Click Create

Monitor Limits

The number of monitors you can create depends on your plan:

Configuration Options

Timing & Sensitivity

Check Interval

How often we check your site. Available options range from 1 minute to 24 hours.

• Recommended: 5 minutes for most websites
• Critical endpoints: 1 minute for mission-critical services where fast detection is essential
• Shorter intervals: Faster detection and more responsive alerts
• Longer intervals: Suitable for non-critical or low-priority endpoints

Request Timeout

How long we wait for a response before marking the check as failed. Range: 1 second to 30 seconds.

• Recommended: 3 seconds for most sites
• Increase if your server has slower cold starts or processing time
• Decrease for faster detection of hanging requests

Failure Threshold (Sensitivity)

How many consecutive failures are required before we open an incident and send alerts. Range: 1 to 10 checks.

• Threshold of 1: Most sensitive. Alerts on the first failure. May cause false alarms from transient network issues.
• Threshold of 3 (recommended): Balances responsiveness with reliability. Waits for 3 consecutive failures before alerting.
• Higher thresholds: More tolerant of brief issues, but slower to alert on real outages.

Calculating Alert Timing

To understand when you’ll receive an alert after downtime begins, multiply your check interval by your failure threshold.

Examples:

• 1-minute interval + threshold of 2 = Alert sent 2 minutes after downtime starts (at earliest)
• 5-minute interval + threshold of 3 = Alert sent 15 minutes after downtime starts (at earliest)
• 1-minute interval + threshold of 1 = Alert sent 1 minute after downtime starts (at earliest)

This helps you balance between fast alerts (lower values) and avoiding false alarms from transient issues (higher values).

Email Alerts

Alerts are sent to the dashboard owner’s email address.

Alert Types

• Down alerts: Sent when the failure threshold is reached and an incident opens
• Recovery alerts: Sent when the site comes back online after an incident
• SSL expiry alerts: Sent when your certificate is approaching expiration

You can enable or disable each alert type independently.

SSL Certificate Monitoring

For HTTPS URLs, we automatically monitor SSL certificate health.

What We Check

• Certificate validity and trust chain
• Expiration date
• Hostname matching
• Common SSL/TLS errors

SSL Expiry Alerts

Configure how many days before expiration you want to start receiving reminders. Options: 1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days.

• Recommended: 14 days gives you time to renew before issues occur
• You’ll receive reminders at key milestones (e.g., if set to 14 days: at 14, 7, 3, and 1 day before expiry)
• Each milestone triggers only one alert. You won’t receive daily reminder spam.

Advanced Configurations

These options are available on Professional and Enterprise plans.

HTTP Method

Choose between HEAD (default) or GET requests.

• HEAD: Faster, checks availability without downloading the full response body
• GET: Downloads the full response. Use this if your server doesn’t support HEAD requests or you need to verify the full response

Custom Request Headers

Add up to 10 custom headers to your monitoring requests. Useful for:

• Authentication tokens
• Custom user-agent strings
• API versioning headers
• Any header your endpoint requires

Accepted Status Codes

By default, we consider any 2xx response as healthy. You can customize this to accept:

• Specific codes (e.g., 200, 201, 204)
• Code ranges (e.g., 2xx, 3xx)
• Up to 5 accepted codes/ranges

This is useful if your health endpoint returns a non-2xx code intentionally.

Understanding Monitor Status

Monitors can be in one of these states:

How Incidents Work

An incident represents a period of downtime or degraded service.

When Incidents Open

An incident opens when:

1. A check fails (timeout, error response, SSL error, etc.)
2. The failure repeats for N consecutive checks, where N is your failure threshold

At this point:

• The monitor status changes to Down
• A Down alert email is sent (if enabled)
• The incident start time is recorded

When Incidents Close

An incident closes when your site starts responding successfully again. We wait for a few consecutive successful checks to confirm the issue is truly resolved before sending the recovery alert—this prevents false “all clear” notifications from a single lucky request.

At recovery:

• The monitor status changes to Up
• A Recovery alert email is sent (if enabled)
• The incident is marked as resolved

Example

• 12:00: First failed check
• 12:05: Second failed check
• 12:10: Third failed check → Incident opens (threshold = 3)
• 12:15: Site recovers
• 12:20: Recovery confirmed → Incident closes

Metrics & Dashboard

24-Hour View

The monitor detail page shows:

• Uptime percentage: Calculated from actual check results
• Response time chart: P50, P95, and average latency over time, along with incident periods
• Uptime grid: Visual indicator of hourly uptime over the last 24 hours
• Incident table: Recent incidents with status, cause, start time, and duration

Recent Checks

View the most recent check results including:

• Timestamp
• Status (OK, Warning, Failed)
• Response time
• HTTP status code
• Failure reason (if applicable)

You can filter to show only errors for quick debugging.

Daily Uptime (180 Days)

A calendar-style grid showing daily uptime percentages. Hover over any day to see the exact percentage.

SSL Certificate Details

For HTTPS monitors, the detail page shows:

• Certificate status: Valid, Expiring Soon, Expired, or Error
• Days until expiration
• Expiry date
• Last SSL check result

Pausing and Deleting Monitors

Pausing

You can pause a monitor temporarily to stop checks without deleting configuration. This is useful during:

• Planned maintenance
• Site migrations
• Temporary shutdowns

Deleting

Deleting a monitor removes all configuration. Historical check data is retained for your analytics records.

Troubleshooting

No Checks Appearing

• Ensure the monitor is not paused
• Wait a few minutes for the first check to complete
• Verify the URL is reachable from the public internet

False Positives / Too Many Alerts

• Increase the failure threshold to 3 or higher
• Increase the request timeout if your server is slow

SSL Monitoring Not Working

• Ensure the URL uses https://
• Verify “Check SSL Errors” is enabled in Advanced Settings

Check Interval Changed Unexpectedly

If you see a different interval than what you configured, automatic backoff may be active. When a monitor fails repeatedly for an extended period, we reduce the check frequency to conserve resources. The interval will return to normal automatically once your site is consistently responding.

Related: Compare pricing plans to see monitor limits and advanced features.