Question 1

What is MonitorAH?

Accepted Answer

MonitorAH is an uptime and health monitoring service for websites, APIs, servers, and SSL certificates. We probe what you tell us to from a dedicated worker, alert you across email / Slack / Discord / Telegram / webhooks when something fails, and surface uptime + response-time analytics plus optional public status pages.

Question 2

How quickly can I set up my first monitor?

Accepted Answer

Under a minute. Sign in with a magic link, click 'New monitor', pick HTTP if you're monitoring a URL, paste the target, save. The first check runs within fifteen seconds and you'll see live status on the dashboard.

Question 3

Do I need a credit card to start?

Accepted Answer

No. The Free plan gives you 3 monitors with 5-minute checks and email alerts at no cost — no card required. You only enter payment when you upgrade for higher limits, faster intervals, or premium channels.

Question 4

Which monitor type should I pick for a website?

Accepted Answer

HTTP. It fetches your URL like a real browser would, follows redirects (optionally), checks the status code, and times the response. Use PING if you only care that the server responds at all, or add SSL alongside HTTP to also watch your certificate expiry.

Question 5

What's the difference between the Free and paid plans?

Accepted Answer

Free is 3 monitors, 5-minute checks, email alerts only, 24-hour log retention. Starter ($9/mo) gives you 20 monitors, 1-minute checks, all chat channels (Slack/Discord/Telegram), and 30-day logs. Pro ($29/mo) unlocks status pages, webhooks, and 30-second checks. Higher tiers add custom domains, audit logs, and white labelling. Full comparison on the pricing page.

Question 6

Can I import monitors from UptimeRobot or Pingdom?

Accepted Answer

Not via a one-click importer in the dashboard yet. Both vendors expose monitor exports as JSON or CSV; you can map them to POST /api/v1/monitors in a short script and load hundreds in seconds. Contact support if you want a hand — we'll usually do small migrations for free.

Question 7

What monitor types do you support?

Accepted Answer

Nine: PING (ICMP echo), HTTP (status code + response), SSL certificate expiry, DNS (A / AAAA / CNAME / MX / TXT / NS lookups), custom port (TCP connect, optional 'alert if open' mode for security hygiene), WHOIS domain expiry, blacklist (DNSBL), and heartbeat (inbound dead-man's-switch).

Question 8

How often are monitors checked?

Accepted Answer

PING and HTTP every 15 seconds, port every minute, DNS every 10 minutes, SSL every 15 minutes, WHOIS and blacklist every hour. Faster cadences (30 s on Pro, 10 s on Agency) are tier-gated; heartbeats fire whenever your cron posts to the inbound URL.

Question 9

What does the SSL monitor check?

Accepted Answer

It connects to your host on port 443, reads the peer certificate, and alerts when expiry is within a configurable warning window (default 30 days). It also flags certificate-chain errors, hostname mismatches, and self-signed certs — all the things that break browsers but rarely surface in logs.

Question 10

How do heartbeat monitors work?

Accepted Answer

Create a HEARTBEAT monitor with a grace window (e.g. 5 minutes for a daily backup with some slack). Your cron job sends POST /api/v1/monitors/<id>/heartbeat each time it succeeds. If we don't see a ping within the grace window, the monitor goes DOWN and your notification rules fire. Perfect for backup jobs, sync workers, and anything that runs out-of-band.

Question 11

Can I monitor that a port should be CLOSED?

Accepted Answer

Yes — flip the 'alert if open' option in the port monitor settings. Useful for verifying that SSH, Redis, or database ports stay firewalled off on internet-facing IPs. The monitor alerts the moment the port unexpectedly opens.

Question 12

How are DNS lookups performed?

Accepted Answer

Resolution goes against the public DNS hierarchy from our resolver — never your local network. Pick any record type (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, NS) and optionally assert that the returned value contains an expected substring — handy for catching propagation failures after a config change.

Question 13

Where do alerts go?

Accepted Answer

Five channels: email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, and custom webhooks. Channels are per account; routing rules decide which event types from which monitors go to which channels.

Question 14

How do I stop a flapping monitor from spamming me?

Accepted Answer

Add a threshold alert on the monitor detail page (Flap suppression section). Set N consecutive failures (e.g. 3) — notifications only fire when the streak hits the threshold, and the recovery email is also suppressed if the threshold was never met. One-second blips stay silent; sustained outages still page you immediately.

Question 15

Can I get a global 'all monitors → email' default?

Accepted Answer

Yes — every new account gets one auto-created on signup (routes DOWN events to your account email). You can add per-monitor or per-channel rules from /notifications. The dashboard's Getting Started card ticks the rule step automatically.

Question 16

Do you deduplicate alerts?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We open one incident per outage and fire exactly one DOWN notification (subject to your threshold setting). The matching UP notification fires on recovery. Flapping inside an open incident doesn't generate extra emails.

Question 17

How do I configure escalation (page on-call after X minutes)?

Accepted Answer

Native escalation policies aren't in v1. Today the recommended pattern is to route DOWN to your incident-management tool (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Better Stack On-Call) via the webhook channel, and let them drive the rotation. Native escalation is on the roadmap.

Question 18

Can I acknowledge an incident?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Open the event on the monitor detail page and click Acknowledge — it records who acknowledged and when. You can also attach a notes field with root-cause or postmortem context; the notes persist with the incident in audit and reporting.

Question 19

What is a public status page?

Accepted Answer

A branded page at /status/<slug> (or your custom domain on Business and above) that shows the live up/down state of monitors you choose, plus the last 90 days of incidents and any scheduled maintenance windows. Anyone with the URL can view it without an account.

Question 20

Which plans include status pages?

Accepted Answer

Pro and above. Free and Starter accounts don't have status pages; the editor and public URL only become available once you upgrade.

Question 21

Can I use my own domain (status.mycompany.com)?

Accepted Answer

Yes on Business and above. Add the domain in the status-page editor, point a CNAME at our endpoint, complete the TXT-record verification, and we issue and renew a Let's Encrypt certificate automatically. No certificate uploads, no manual renewals.

Question 22

Can I remove the 'Powered by MonitorAH' footer?

Accepted Answer

Yes on Agency and above. The white-label option removes the footer entirely and lets you render the page in your own colours and logo — fully branded for resellers and managed-service providers.

Question 23

Can I schedule maintenance windows?

Accepted Answer

Yes (Pro and above). Set them up in the status-page editor with a title, optional description, start, and end. The public page shows a yellow 'Maintenance in progress' banner during the window and lists upcoming maintenance for the next 7 days.

Question 24

Can my customers subscribe to status updates?

Accepted Answer

Subscriber emails / SMS / RSS are not yet in v1. You can link the status page from your product or push updates yourself via your existing email tooling. Native subscribers are on the roadmap.

Question 25

Is there a REST API?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every product capability — monitors, events, analytics, notification channels and rules, status pages, alerts, subscription, API keys — is exposed under /api/v1/*. The OpenAPI 3.1 spec lives at /api/v1/openapi.json and is rendered as interactive docs at /docs/api.

Question 26

How do I authenticate?

Accepted Answer

Create an API key at /developer/api-keys, then send Authorization: Bearer mon_live_<key>. The full key is shown exactly once at creation time; we only store its sha256 hash. Keys can be revoked instantly and have optional expiry timestamps.

Question 27

What scopes are available?

Accepted Answer

monitors:read, monitors:write, events:read, events:write, notifications:read, notifications:write, status-pages:read, status-pages:write, api-keys:read, api-keys:write, and subscription:read. Use the narrowest scope that does the job; * is supported for CI keys but logs warnings.

Question 28

What are the rate limits?

Accepted Answer

60 requests per minute on Free, 120 on Starter, 300 on Pro, 600 on Business, 1200 on Agency, custom on Enterprise. 429 responses include Retry-After and X-RateLimit-Reset headers so your client can back off cleanly.

Question 29

Can I use Idempotency-Key on mutations?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every mutating endpoint honours Idempotency-Key for 24 hours. Re-submitting the same key on the same path returns the original response, so safe retries from your client won't create duplicate monitors / channels / status pages.

Question 30

Do you support outbound webhooks?

Accepted Answer

Yes (Pro and above). Create a WEBHOOK notification channel with your URL and optional secret; we POST signed JSON (HMAC-SHA256 in the X-Monitorah-Signature header) on each event. Verifying the signature is a four-line snippet in any language.

Question 31

Where is my data stored?

Accepted Answer

All customer data is stored in the EU on infrastructure we own and operate. Payments are processed by Stripe; nothing else is shared.

Question 32

How do you protect against probes hitting internal addresses?

Accepted Answer

Our probes are restricted to public addresses. Internal IP ranges, loopback, and cloud-metadata endpoints are blocked, and we re-check DNS at probe time so a host can't be rebound to an internal address mid-check.

Question 33

Are passwords stored anywhere?

Accepted Answer

No. We use magic-link sign-in — we email a single-use link, you click it, you're in. There are no passwords to store, leak, or reset.

Question 34

How are API keys protected?

Accepted Answer

API keys are never stored in full — we keep only a one-way hash that can't be reversed. The raw key is shown to you exactly once at creation. The mon_live_ prefix is also recognised by GitHub's secret-scanning program, so keys accidentally pushed to public repositories get revoked automatically.

Question 35

Is my data shared with third parties?

Accepted Answer

We use Stripe for payments. That's it — we don't share monitor data, alerts, or analytics with anyone else, and we don't run external trackers on the dashboard.

Question 36

What's your GDPR posture?

Accepted Answer

We're EU-based with EU data residency. Account deletion removes everything tied to your account — monitors, events, channels, API keys, and audit history. Email support@monitorah.com to request it; we process within 30 days.

Question 37

How do I upgrade?

Accepted Answer

Sign in and go to Dashboard → Upgrade. Pay with any card via Stripe Checkout; both monthly and yearly are available on every paid tier, with a 17% saving on yearly. The upgrade takes effect immediately and Stripe handles prorations for you.

Question 38

How does the monitor limit work after a downgrade?

Accepted Answer

We block the downgrade in Stripe Checkout if you'd exceed the new tier's monitor limit, and tell you how many monitors to deactivate first. Once you're under the new limit the downgrade goes through immediately — no auto-deactivation behind your back.

Question 39

What happens if my payment fails?

Accepted Answer

We send three emails (first failure, 3-day reminder, 7-day cancellation) and show a warning banner on the dashboard and billing pages until the card is updated. After 7 days of failures the subscription cancels and your plan drops to Free; your data is preserved and re-subscribing restores everything.

Question 40

Do you offer refunds?

Accepted Answer

Yes on annual plans: pro-rata refunds within 14 days of the initial charge. Monthly plans are not refunded but you can cancel anytime to stop the next renewal. Enterprise contracts have refund terms negotiated in the agreement.

Question 41

Can I get an invoice or VAT receipt?

Accepted Answer

Every Stripe charge generates a downloadable PDF invoice from the customer portal. EU customers can add their VAT ID in the portal; reverse-charge VAT applies where applicable. Larger invoices can be wired with separate billing terms — contact sales.

Question 42

My HTTP monitor says DOWN but the site loads fine in a browser. Why?

Accepted Answer

Three common culprits. (1) Your CDN or firewall is blocking our probe — add 'mon-probe' to your User-Agent allow-list, or accept traffic from our published probe IPs. (2) The monitor is expecting a status code your site doesn't return (e.g. 200 vs 301) — add the real code to the expected-status list on the monitor. (3) Redirects: we don't follow them by default; switch on the 'follow redirects' option if your URL redirects to the real content.

Question 43

I'm not receiving alerts. What do I check?

Accepted Answer

In order: (1) /notifications has at least one rule with eventType=DOWN routing to a real channel. (2) The channel is marked Active. (3) For email: check spam — sender is alerts@monitorah.com — and confirm the address in the channel config matches an inbox you actually read. (4) For Slack/Discord: verify the webhook URL still works; it expires if the channel or webhook is deleted in your workspace. (5) For Telegram: re-add the bot to the chat if you've removed it.

Question 44

My SSL monitor flagged 'certificate expires soon' but I just renewed.

Accepted Answer

The probe re-reads the cert on its next 15-minute tick. If you renewed the cert on disk but didn't restart the TLS listener (nginx, your load balancer, etc.), the old cert is still being served. Restart the service or hot-reload its config so the new cert is presented, then the next probe will pick it up.

Question 45

My heartbeat monitor is stuck in DOWN even though my cron runs.

Accepted Answer

Check the request shape: it must be POST (not GET), and to /api/v1/monitors/<id>/heartbeat. GET would have been a CSRF risk — accidental link previews from chat clients could silently reset the monitor. Also confirm the cron actually receives a 2xx response; if your network blocks outbound POST or the worker hits a connection limit, the ping never reaches us.

Question 46

My WHOIS monitor returns 'rate limited'.

Accepted Answer

Some registries (especially .com via Verisign and several country TLDs) aggressively rate-limit WHOIS queries from anonymous IPs. We back off and retry, but if the issue persists more than 24 hours, contact support — we can shift you to a different upstream or relax the warning window for that monitor.

Questions, answered

Getting started

Monitor types

Alerts and notifications

Public status pages

API and integrations

Security and privacy

Billing and plans

Troubleshooting

Still have questions?