Extending uptime monitoring with POST, PUT & PATCH methods

Next to our standard uptime monitoring through GET requests, we've added support for POST, PUT & PATCH methods too.

More uptime monitoring capabilities

We've had the option to monitor websites via a GET request since the very launch. It allows us to probe and test 99% of the sites out there for their uptime and report the owner if it's down.

But it doesn't quite fit every use case, and extending the available methods opens up many new doors & possibilities.

Adding POSTS, PUT & PATCH

In your site settings, you can now choose which method we should use to probe your website. If you're choosing something other than a GET request, you can specify the payload too.

This allows for some interesting extra checks;

• You can validate the search results on a page using POST, with the optional "Verify text", you can make sure the page returns the items you expect
• You can simulate a website login
• You can simulate any form submission and the resulting page
• You can probe advanced API endpoints that modify data with PUT or PATCH

And that's not everything.

In the age of serverless, keep your functions warm

In one of our earlier blogposts, we mentioned how you can use our crawler to keep your site caches warm.

While this is super useful, it didn't catch every use case: your site is more than a series of pages, strung together.

Your site consists of a login form, a search field, a contact form, ... but our crawler only sees the forms, not the output after a form submission.

These new uptime methods allow you to keep your code "warm", if you're using serverless solutions. This prevents (sometimes significant) delays in boot times for functions that aren't being hit too often.

By adding monitoring probes to those endpoints, you gain 2 important benefits;

• If it's down, you'll know about it
• Your functions are always warm and ready to serve production traffic, without a delay

These new methods also open the door to more advanced scenarios, where you can simulate most of the functionality of any website, giving you complete uptime coverage of your site - not just your homepage.