Frequently asked questions

FetchPing is an uptime monitoring service that checks your websites, APIs, servers, and cron jobs at regular intervals and alerts you the moment something fails. You get a dashboard showing check history, response times, and incidents, plus public status pages to share with your users.

After signing in, click Monitors in the sidebar, then New monitor. Enter a name, choose a monitor type, enter the target (a URL, IP, or domain), and set your check interval. Click Create monitor and the first check will run within the minute.

Free plan monitors check every 5 minutes. Pro plan monitors can check as frequently as every 30 seconds. You set the interval per monitor when creating or editing it.

FetchPing supports seven monitor types:

• HTTP/HTTPS — checks a URL and confirms it returns a successful status code.
• TCP port — opens a connection to a host and port to confirm it is accepting connections.
• ICMP ping — pings an IP address or hostname to confirm it is reachable on the network.
• DNS — resolves a domain and alerts if the records change or the lookup fails.
• SSL certificate — checks the certificate is valid and alerts before it expires. Pro plan only.
• Domain expiry — monitors your domain registration and alerts before it expires. Pro plan only.
• Heartbeat — watches for inbound pings from your scheduled tasks. Pro plan only.

To avoid false positives from brief network blips, FetchPing runs a second check roughly 30 seconds after detecting a failure. An alert only fires if both checks fail. This means you will not be woken up at 2am by a transient glitch that resolved itself immediately.

FetchPing runs checks from two regions: US East and EU West (Frankfurt). You choose the region per monitor. Running the same monitor from two regions lets you distinguish a local outage from a global one.

Alert channels are notification destinations — an email address, a Discord webhook, a Microsoft Teams webhook, a Slack webhook, or a generic webhook URL. You create channels under Alert Channels in the sidebar, then assign them to individual monitors on the monitor edit page. A monitor with no assigned channels sends alerts to your account email by default.

In Discord, open the channel you want alerts in. Click the gear icon to open channel settings, then go to Integrations → Webhooks → New Webhook. Give it a name (e.g. "FetchPing"), optionally set an avatar, and click Copy Webhook URL.

In FetchPing, go to Alert Channels → Add channel, choose Discord, paste the URL, give the channel a label, and save. Then edit the monitors you want to notify and check the Discord channel in the Alert Channels section.

FetchPing will send a rich embedded message with colour coding (red for down, green for recovered) and a direct link to the monitor. Discord alerts are available on the free plan.

In Teams, click the ... next to the channel name and choose Connectors. Find Incoming Webhook and click Configure. Give it a name, optionally upload a logo, click Create, and copy the webhook URL.

In FetchPing, go to Alert Channels → Add channel, choose Microsoft Teams, paste the URL, give it a label, and save. Then assign the channel to your monitors.

FetchPing sends an Adaptive Card with colour-coded status, a fact table showing the target, type, and time, and a button to view the monitor. Microsoft Teams alerts require a Pro plan.

In Slack, go to Apps → Incoming WebHooks and add a new configuration. Select the channel you want alerts in and copy the webhook URL Slack provides.

In FetchPing, go to Alert Channels → Add channel, choose Slack Webhook, paste the URL, label it, and save. Assign the channel to your monitors on the monitor edit page. Slack alerts require a Pro plan.

Go to Alert Channels → Add channel, choose Webhook, and enter the URL of your endpoint. FetchPing will POST a JSON payload to that URL whenever an alert fires. The payload includes the monitor name, target, status, error message (if any), and timestamp. Webhook alerts are available on the free plan.

Yes. You can assign any alert channel to as many monitors as you like. One Discord channel can cover your entire monitor set if you want everything in one place.

Yes. FetchPing sends a recovery notification to all assigned channels when a monitor comes back online. Recovery alerts always fire regardless of the cooldown window — the cooldown only applies to repeated down alerts, not to recoveries.

A cooldown prevents you from being flooded during a prolonged outage. If a monitor is down for several hours, the cooldown limits how frequently repeat alerts fire. Recovery notifications are never subject to the cooldown and always send immediately.

A heartbeat monitor watches for inbound pings from your system rather than making outbound checks. Instead of FetchPing checking your service, your service checks in with FetchPing. If it stops checking in, FetchPing alerts you.

This is ideal for monitoring cron jobs, scheduled tasks, backup scripts, and any automated process that should run on a schedule.

Go to Monitors → New monitor and choose Heartbeat as the type. Set a name and configure the grace period — how long FetchPing waits after an expected ping before alerting. Save the monitor.

On the monitor detail page you will see a unique heartbeat URL that looks like:

https://fetchping.com/api/v1/heartbeat/{your-token}

Add a step to your cron job or script that sends a GET request to this URL after it completes successfully. That is all you need.

Add a curl call to the end of your cron job or script:

curl -sS --max-time 10 https://fetchping.com/api/v1/heartbeat/{token} > /dev/null

The > /dev/null discards the output so it does not appear in your cron logs. --max-time 10 ensures the ping does not hang if the network is slow. Only ping the URL after the task completes successfully so FetchPing knows the job ran.

The grace period is how long FetchPing waits after an expected ping before treating the monitor as down. If your cron job runs every hour, set a grace period of 5 to 10 minutes. This allows for slight delays in job execution without triggering false alerts.

Simply do not ping the heartbeat URL if the job fails. Only send the ping at the very end of a successful run. If the job crashes or exits early, no ping reaches FetchPing and you will be alerted after the grace period.

A server agent is a small script you install directly on your own server. Unlike a regular monitor, which checks your service from the outside, an agent reports from the inside: CPU usage, memory, disk space, load average, and whether specific processes are still running. It tells you why something broke, not just that it did.

Go to Agents → Add Agent, give it a name, and optionally list any processes you want watched (like nginx or mysqld). FetchPing generates a one-line install command:

curl -sSL https://fetchping.com/api/agent/install.sh?token={your-token} | sudo bash

Run that on the server you want to monitor. It installs a small bash script, sets up a cron job, and sends its first report within a few seconds.

CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage per mount, load average, and the running status of any processes you choose to watch. Nothing else. The agent is a plain, readable bash script with no external dependencies, so you can open it and see exactly what it does before running it.

Every 5 minutes by default, via a cron job the install script sets up automatically. If an agent goes 12 minutes or more without reporting, FetchPing flags it offline and alerts you, since that usually means the server is down or the cron job stopped running.

Yes. Add process names to the watch list when creating the agent, or any time afterward from the agent's settings page. If a watched process stops running, you get alerted, and again when it comes back.

Yes. Every agent has a configurable disk alert threshold, 90% by default. If any mounted filesystem crosses that threshold, you get alerted once, and the alert clears automatically once usage drops back down.

No. The agent checks in with FetchPing for its current watch list on every run, so changes made in the dashboard take effect on the very next check, typically within 5 minutes.

Free includes 2 agents, Pro includes 20. If you need more, contact us about Enterprise.

Go to Status Pages in the sidebar and click New status page. Give it a title, an optional description, and a public slug (the part of the URL after /status/). Choose which monitors to display on the page and save. Your status page is immediately live at the URL shown.

Yes. Each public status page has a subscribe form where visitors can enter their email address. They receive a confirmation email and then get notified whenever an incident opens or resolves on that page.

Free accounts can have up to 2 status pages. Pro accounts can have up to 20. Enterprise accounts have no limit.

Custom domain support is on the roadmap. For now, status pages are hosted at fetchping.com/status/{slug}. The slug is a random unguessable string by default, so you can share it with users without it being publicly discoverable.

Yes, free plan status pages display a small advertisement. Upgrading to Pro removes ads from both your dashboard and all your public status pages.

One user creates a team and invites others by email. All team members share the same monitors, alert channels, and status pages in one dashboard. Team members inherit the plan of the team owner — if the owner is on Pro, all members get Pro features.

Go to Team in the sidebar and enter the email address of the person you want to invite. They will receive an email with an invitation link valid for 7 days. They need a FetchPing account to accept — if they do not have one, the invite page links them to registration.

Yes. All team members can create, edit, and view monitors. Alert channels and status pages are also shared across the team.

When a member leaves or is removed, their alert channels are automatically transferred to the team owner so nothing is lost. Any of their channels that were assigned to monitors they did not personally own are unassigned from those monitors to prevent unexpected alerts continuing to fire.

There is no hard limit on team members. The plan limit (monitors, status pages, check intervals) is determined by the team owner's plan and applies to the team as a whole.

The free plan includes 5 monitors, checks every 5 minutes, 30 days of history, email, Discord, and webhook alerts, DNS change detection, multi-region checks, 2 status pages, and team accounts. No credit card required.

Pro includes 50 monitors, checks as fast as every 30 seconds, 120 days of history, SSL and domain expiry monitoring, heartbeat monitors, security header scanning, Microsoft Teams and Slack alerts, 20 status pages, no ads on your dashboard or status pages, and no 60-day login requirement.

Pro is $9 per month. No contracts, no annual commitment. Cancel at any time and you will retain Pro access until the end of your billing period.

Go to Billing in the sidebar footer (or Dashboard → Billing). Click Upgrade to Pro and you will be taken to a secure Stripe checkout page. Your plan upgrades immediately after payment and the features are available straight away.

Go to Billing in your dashboard and click Open billing portal. This takes you to Stripe's hosted portal where you can cancel your subscription. You keep Pro access until the end of your current billing period.

To keep the platform healthy, free accounts that have not been used in 60 days have their monitors automatically paused. This prevents resource use for genuinely abandoned accounts. Logging in to your dashboard counts as activity and resets the clock. Pro and Enterprise accounts are exempt from this rule entirely.

Yes. Enterprise includes 500 monitors, unlimited status pages, a 30-second minimum check interval, and no inactivity restrictions. If you need custom limits, an SLA, or volume pricing, contact us at contact@fetchping.com.

Only if you opt in. The marketing email checkbox on registration is unchecked by default, and you can turn it on or off at any time from Account Settings. Transactional emails like alert notifications, password resets, and verification emails are separate and are not affected by this setting since they are necessary to operate the service.

Yes. Go to Settings → Privacy and Data → Export my data, confirm your password, and you will receive a JSON file containing your account details, monitors, status pages, alert channels, and incidents.

Go to Settings → Privacy and Data → Delete my account. You will need to confirm your password and type DELETE to proceed. This immediately and permanently removes your account, monitors, status pages, alert channels, and incident history. This action cannot be undone, so export your data first if you want to keep a copy.

Not fully, but we are working toward it. We have implemented opt-in (not opt-out) marketing consent, self-serve data export, and self-serve account deletion. We are not yet able to make a complete compliance claim. See our Privacy Policy for the current state.

FetchPing considers a monitor down when it fails two consecutive checks. The first failure triggers a recheck after roughly 30 seconds. If the recheck also fails, the monitor is marked down and alerts are sent. This prevents alerts from brief network blips or momentary server hiccups.

Yes. HTTP monitors follow redirects by default and consider any final 2xx response as up. You can optionally assert on specific status codes or response body content with Pro plan response assertions.

FetchPing checks the SSL certificate of your HTTPS monitors and tracks the expiry date. You will receive an alert a set number of days before the certificate expires so you have time to renew it. This is a Pro plan feature.

DNS monitors snapshot your DNS records on every check. If any record changes — an A record pointing to a new IP, an MX record added or removed — FetchPing alerts you. This catches misconfigurations, propagation issues, and potential hijacking early.

For HTTP monitors, FetchPing can scan the security headers returned by your server and score them against best practices. Headers like Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, and others are checked. Missing or misconfigured headers are flagged. This is a Pro plan feature.

Not currently. FetchPing makes checks from our own servers, so the target must be reachable from the internet. Support for private network monitoring via an agent is on the roadmap.

Free plan accounts retain 30 days of check history. Pro plan accounts retain 120 days. History older than the retention window is automatically deleted. The all-time ping count is preserved separately so the homepage statistics remain accurate.