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What is a ping?

A ping is a signal that is sent to a specific monitor via a POST request to the https://www.alertersystem.com/api/ping API endpoint.

Depending on the monitor type, a ping can signify that some external event happened, or some expected external event did not happen.

Our service accepts authenticated and unauthenticated pings. Each monitor has a flag that indicates whether it will accept unauthenticated pings.

What values can I provide in the custom code field, and what do they mean?

The custom code field enables you to send special commands to a monitor. The following options are available:

• pause: Used to pause a monitor. While a monitor is paused, it does not dispatch any alerts.
• resume: Resumes the normal operation of a paused monitor. In other words, it will start dispatching alerts again.
• fail: Indicates that the monitored service failed, and sets the monitor to a failed status. Not applicable to At Ping, Web Content and Web Response monitors.
• reset: Sets the monitor to an "OK" status. Not applicable to At Ping, Web Content and Web Response monitors.
• start: Starts the clock of a Measured monitor type.
• stop: Stops the clock of a Measured monitor type.

Is there a limit on the number of pings?

There is no limit to the total number of pings that can be sent to a monitor or to the API.

We do apply very generous API rate limits that throttle the number of API calls to a specific endpoint per minute. The HTTP response headers of each API request contain the details about the rate limit for that particular endpoint.

Where can I see why a successful ping did not produce the expected results?

Look in the Alert Logs history to see if there are any error entries.

If an alert service cannot dispatch an alert due to an error, the details of the error will be in the Alert Log history.