Categories
Announcements

“Web Hook” Alert Contacts (New Feature)

Quick links

    There is a new “alert contact type” in town: “Web Hooks“.

    In its simplest form, “Uptime Robot sends a request to a URL that you mention” with all parameters of the monitor.

    After that, you can handle this request and use the information in it for many possible things like sending custom notifications to your clients, restarting servers, integrating Uptime Robot with 3rd party products/services, etc.

    Web Hook

    It can be used in 2 ways:

    • standard: a standard querystring is added to the end of the Web Hook alert contact
    • custom: a totally custom querystring structure can be created with the variables provided

    As an example:

    If a web-hook alert contact is http://www.domain.com/?, Uptime Robot will send a notification like http://www.domain.com/?monitorID=95987545252&monitorURL=http://test.com&monitorFriendlyName=Test Website&alertType=*0&alertDetails=Connection Timeout&monitorAlertContacts=457;2;john@doe.com.

    Or, a custom Web Hook can be created like http://www.domain.com/?id=*monitorID*&type=*alertType* by simply using the variables wrapped inside ** characters.

    These variables can be found in the “Create New Alert Contact” dialog in “My Settings page”.

    Hope that it can simplify any possible integrations.

    91 replies on ““Web Hook” Alert Contacts (New Feature)”

    Hey guys, thanks for the great service and all your hard work!
    I really like this new web hook feature, but some of my services where I could use this only accept POST requests. Any possibility of extending the web hook feature with POST in the future?

    Thanks!
    -John

    Slack is officially supported as an alert contact in UR.

    And, POST support is now available :).

    This. This right here is amazing. With being able to add servers via the API and now getting callbacks when there is a problem we can do so much to automate problem solving.

    Love this, using this now to hook to a C# page that sends a customized notification to Pushover on my iPhone. Excellent update.

    I’m thinking we can use this in some way to utilize the Zendesk API to create a new Zendesk ticket automatically. Anyone here familiar with the Zendesk API that can hack that together?

    Great feature addition! This opens up all sorts of things we can do with up/down notifications… now if I just had time to write the receiving code on my own end!

    What would really improve this service for me is the ability to indicate during what time period my sites should be checked. Now I often get notifications that one or more sites are down, but this is during regular maintenance at night. I would love it if I could have my sites checked during day hours only.

    this is awsome! this is a feature you would expect for some sort of “pro” account, but offerering this for free is just amazing! thanks.
    Freek

    Exactly, Freek! This is something we would expect of a pro account. But, even other paid services do not offer the simplicity of UptimeRobot. And their new UI is awesome 🙂

    Thanks that sounds good and I’m excited to use this feature for my clients. However I would love to have a bulk upload even limited to 10, 20, 100 what is the best. Quite often my clients have some micro sites and would love to upload the list at once. Thx

    This is very cool. With a little work, I can see how one could get their alerts integrated with IFTTT now… but before I go that route myself, any word if UptimeRobot will be getting an IFTTT.com channel any time in the future?

    You guys need to think of some cheap, useful features, so my company has an excuse to give you guys $5 per month. 🙂

    Thx so much for the support guys 🙂 We are definitely getting close to the limit where the service requires funding as it grows fast but still no hard decisions on that. That’s the last option.

    I second the motion for POST, and also found the comment about using this for Pushover interesting. I was actually pretty excited about the possibility of going straight to Pushover from a Web Hook, but their API does not support GET, only POST (they are pretty emphatic about it: https://pushover.net/api). They also require https:, and it’s not mentioned in this blog post if that will work at all. I could create a custom interim page, but if the site that is being monitored is the one hosting the page that forwards the alert to Pushover… not very useful!

    But I LOVE the new feature. Maybe I can figure out a way to hook it all up with IFTTT or something.

    I poked around on IFTT a little bit, and realized that there might be ways to make this work, but it’s easier just to notify via email and get to Pushover that way. When you get POST support ready for prime time, I’ll be one of the first to try it out!

    We have a Zapier integration in beta. Just let us (support@uptimerobot.com) know if you wanna give it a try.

    Great …
    I can call my SMS API now with this…
    Need to explore more for U & Down alerts…
    Currently using my own scheduled EXE for such notifications…

    Kedar

    Dudes! Shut up and take my money!

    It’s great to have uptimerobot as a service for free, but I’d rather use a service that’s reliable than free. And nobody can work for free, so you should start charging for your service soon to validate your business model and to make sure you’re still here tomorrow:
    http://www.paperplanes.de/2014/2/18/why-you-should-charge-for-your-beta-product.html

    I’m not dissatisfied or anything, but I think a service which is valuable for customers should also generate some value on the provider side. Either that, or it will turn out bad some day.

    :)) Totally see your point and we are discussing ways to building a solid financing plan for the service so that it is future is under guarantee. So good to hear that “if things become premium one day, there will be users behind it”.

    Thanks very much for pointing that. Yes, there was a limit which can be low for some URLs.

    Just updated this limit and it shall be ok now.

    Hi,
    I am not having any luck receiving a web-hook notification when a monitor goes down/up.
    I have attached 2 alert contacts to my test monitor (1 email alert and the other is a web-hook alert). When I perform my test by bringing my site down I find that I am successfully getting notified via the email alert but the web-hook is apparently not sending anything.
    (I have also tried tests where I have removed the email alert and just have a web-hook alert in case that is interfering but still not working)

    My web-hook is configured in my UptimeRobot settings as follows:
    http://mysite.com/some-script.php?

    Just for the purposes of my tests the “some-script.php” file currently only has a simple print statement to catch the $_GET data from the alert, ie,
    if ( isset($_GET[‘monitorID’]) ){
    error_log(“monitor id = “.$_GET[‘monitorID’], 3, dirname( __FILE__ ).’/web_hook.log’ );
    }

    Does anyone have any tips or clues about what I might be doing wrong?

    Hi,

    Although I’m kind of a techie guy, I must confess I don’t quite get this. I get that I can send some sort of request somewhere, but when you say that I can “handle the request” and “use the information” I’m a complete blank.

    If you were to provide one or two specific examples, perhaps it might be more clear to those of us less techie than others of us, perhaps?

    🙂

    — Arthur Cronos

    Hi there, great service, thanks for providing!

    Could I request that the webhook provide additional detail as opposed to just up/down, perhaps the content that is causing it to be down?

    I have a “keyword” monitor that looks for specific content, and that’s great when it works, but when it does not work, it would be good to know what caused it to fail.

    For example, did the monitor fail because it received a 500 response code or some other connection issue to my server? Or did it fail because the expected content was not returned?

    Those are 2 very different issues and it would be good to know which one it was.

    We’ll soon start attaching the headers and HTML returned once a keyword monitor goes down and it’ll definitely help with that.

    This doesn’t appear to be playing nicely with Zapier. After entering the zapier webhook URL, it seems as if no communication is sent initially to let Zapier know the webhook is set up. This means Zapier cannot digest the incoming data and attempt to parse it and use it.

    I tried creating a dummy URL to test for so that it would send Zapier data but nothing happened.

    Any idea? Would you be able to set up a proper integration with Zapier. It would be very very useful!

    Although not 100% sure, as far as I know, Zapier expects HTTP POST data where the web-hooks only support GET for now.

    We’ll be adding POST support but also planning to add a direct Zapier integration in the next weeks.

    It was planned to be out already but we have spent an unexpected time with the scaling of the system and it shall be out within weeks now.

    Hi there! I use this great tool to monitor a few of my own websites, but last time I tried to add one website of my friend and Uptime Robot saw it as down, but it was working properly. What could be the problem? Maybe branch of this website? Regards, Pawcio

    There is a chance that the Uptime Robot’s requests may be blocked by the server.

    Or, we also experience that the keywords are mentioned in different cases (they are case sensitive) which can be the reason too.

    I’ve been trying web hook for 2 months. So far It works almost perfectly (sometimes it failed) sent a web hook when my server goes down (monitor down) but It never sent a monitor up at all although the server has been up. The other alert type sent me the monitor up normally. Is there any configuration I missed for setting up this web hook? Regards.

    That is an odd case as, if the down works, the up shall definitely work too.

    Any chance that the requests arrive and the handling of them fails?

    I’ll strongly suggest creating a HookBin (https://hookbin.com/), add it as a web-hook and test to see if it works ok (which it shall be).

    Hi! I use UptimeRobot to monitor my website – to know is it online and to check guys who give me hosting services 🙂 I also recommend UR to my customers who are interested to use this tool, but one of my custormers has website in adult niche and there is a little problem with UR – the tool says that website is down, but when we check it live – it is online. Do you think that adult niche could be the problem?
    Regards,
    Michal

    this documentation is rather poor
    we get from uptimerobot call on our hook
    alertType as 1, or 0 — is there any other possible values?
    also for the alertTypeFriendlyName we get Up or Down values not the actual friendly name of the alert…
    can someone shed some light here and write a good documentation for web hooks support in uptime robot?

    Part of the problem is that this doesn’t seem to exist anymore:
    These variables can be found in the “Create New Alert Contact” dialog in “My Settings page”.

    Can you give more examples? It’s not clear what the different between GET, POST, JSON and Query String are.

    Anyone try and setup a Web Hook to Zoom Chat? Zoom Chat requires the token in the header, and I can’t find a way to set that up in UTR. Thanks.

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *