The most common uptime check — and what it actually tells you.
HTTP monitoring sends real requests and checks status codes, response time, and redirects. Learn how it works and when to use it over ping or port monitoring.
HTTP monitoring sends an actual HTTP(S) request to a URL and evaluates the response. Unlike ping or port monitoring, which only test network reachability, HTTP monitoring verifies that the web server is up, serving the correct status code, and responding within an acceptable time window.
A typical check records three things: the HTTP status code (200, 301, 404, 500, etc.), the response time in milliseconds, and whether the connection succeeded at all. Some monitors also follow redirects and inspect the response body for a keyword. If the status code falls outside your expected range, or the request times out, the monitor flags an incident.
Status codes are the core signal. A healthy endpoint returns 2xx (success) or a 3xx redirect you expect. Anything in the 4xx or 5xx range usually means a problem — though 401 and 403 may be expected for authenticated endpoints you monitor with credentials. The monitor should let you define which codes count as "up" rather than assuming only 200 is valid.
Redirects matter because a misconfigured redirect chain can break a site without any single request returning an error. A good HTTP monitor follows redirects (up to a sane limit) and reports the final status code and total time. Response time is the secondary signal: a page that normally loads in 200ms suddenly taking 8 seconds is degraded even if it returns 200, and you want to be alerted before users complain.
Use HTTP monitoring as your primary check for any web-facing endpoint: websites, APIs, web apps, and login pages. It catches the failures users actually notice — application errors, bad deployments, reverse proxy issues, and expired SSL causing connection failures.
Pair it with port monitoring for services like databases that don't speak HTTP, and with ping monitoring for raw host reachability. HTTP monitoring is included on every SurePing plan, including Free, with configurable expected status codes and timeout thresholds.
SurePing includes this monitor type on every plan — including the free tier.