Use the Advanced Settings
Use the Advanced Settings to customize your Monitor, and define custom Request as well as Response Settings.
How to Use the Advanced Settings
Access the Advanced Settings
Advanced Settings can be accessed in two places:
- During Initial Creation: If you are creating a new Website or Keyword monitor, the Advanced Settings can be configured directly in the Website Monitoring pop-up that appears when you click Add Monitor button.
- For Existing Monitors: To edit an existing monitor, use the following steps:
- Go to your Monitors Page: https://app.pulsetic.com/monitors.
- Tap the name or select the three dots next to the Latest Check information of the Monitor you want to update.
- Select Advanced Settings.
- Once you’re on Advanced Settings, you'll see the following: General Settings, Request Settings, and Response Settings.
General Settings
- Add the URL that should be monitored.
- Define the optional settings such as Name, Notification Delay in Minutes, the Max Timeout in Seconds, Check Frequency, and Resend Notification Frequency.
- Turn on Enable SSL check and Enable Redirect Check as needed.
- Turn on Enable Cachebuster if you need to add a random timestamp to the URL on each check to bypass any caching mechanisms and ensure fresh results.
- Apply your settings by selecting Update.
Request Settings
- Select Request Settings.
- Select Request Type.
- HTTP
- TCP
- ICMP
- Select an HTTP Method.
- GET: Retrieve data
- POST: Submits an entity to a specific resource
- PUT: Replaces using the data from the request
- PATCH: Applies partial modifications
- DELETE: Deletes the specified data
- HEAD: Retrieve data without the response body
- OPTIONS: Describes the communication options
- Define the Body type and data or Params. This could be data you're sending (for POST/PUT/PATCH) or parameters you're including in the URL.
- Define any custom headers in the Request Headers.
- Select Update.
Response Settings
- On the Advanced Settings tab, click Response Settings.
- Add your Response text (keyword), Response Headers.
- Save your changes by selecting Update.
- To validate your settings, click Run Check & See Result.
How Notification Delay in Minutes Works
To reduce noise from short interruptions, offline alerts are sent only after a delay.
When a monitor changes from online to offline, a 5-minute timer starts. If the monitor stays offline for the full 5 minutes, with no status change during that time, an offline notification is sent when the timer expires.
If the monitor comes back online before the 5 minutes are over, the pending offline notification is canceled and nothing is sent.
If the monitor goes offline again later, a new 5-minute timer starts from that new offline event.
An online notification is sent only if an offline notification was already sent before. This avoids sending a recovery message for an outage that never generated an alert.
Repeated checks with the same status do not create new events and do not restart the timer. Only a real status change, such as online -> offline or offline -> online, affects notification logic.
Example 1: Monitor stays offline
- Monitor goes offline at 12:00
- A 5-minute delay starts
- At 12:05, the monitor is still offline and the status has not changed
- An offline notification is sent
Example 2: Monitor recovers before the delay ends, then goes offline again
- Monitor goes offline at 12:00
- A 5-minute delay starts
- Monitor comes back online at 12:01
- No notification is sent, because the offline delay had not completed yet
- Monitor goes offline again at 12:03
- A new 5-minute delay starts from 12:03
- The offline event from 12:00 is discarded because the monitor did not remain offline continuously for 5 minutes
- At 12:08, if the monitor is still offline and the status has not changed again, an offline notification is sent
Example 3: Offline alert is sent, then the monitor recovers
- Monitor goes offline at 12:00
- A 5-minute delay starts
- At 12:05, the monitor is still offline and the status has not changed
- An offline notification is sent
- Monitor comes back online at 12:06
- An online notification is sent, because the offline alert had already been sent
Important behavior to know
A monitor can only generate one offline alert for the same outage. After an offline notification has been sent, no additional offline notifications are sent unless the monitor first comes back online and then goes offline again.
This means the notification flow is:
online -> offline -> wait 5 minutes -> send offline alert -> online -> send recovery alert