Frequently asked questions.

Yes. MonitorGiant is a free website monitoring and uptime monitoring platform. The Free plan gives you 25 monitors for website monitoring, API monitoring, server monitoring, and more — with 5-minute checks, instant downtime alerts, and full incident history. No credit card required, no trial expiry.

Your 25-monitor lifetime quota is the total number of monitors you can ever create on the Free plan — including deleted ones. If you need more, contact us at [email protected] and we can set up a custom plan for your team.

No. Monitor type is locked when you create it. This protects the integrity of your check history. If you need a different type, create a new monitor — your existing one counts against your quota regardless.

5 minutes only. Shorter intervals (down to 30 seconds) are available on paid plans. On the Free plan, the interval selector shows other options as disabled so you can see what's coming.

MonitorGiant supports 17 channels: Email, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, Gotify, Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Generic Webhook (HMAC signed), Pushover, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Zapier, Make (Integromat), Splunk On-Call, Zulip, and Rocket.Chat. Email, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, and Gotify are included on the free plan — no credit card needed. All other channels are available on paid plans.

HTTP/HTTPS — website monitoring and API monitoring via status code checks. Keyword — scans response bodies for text strings. Ping — server monitoring and host reachability. Port — deep server monitoring to confirm TCP services are listening. SSL Expiry — downtime monitoring before a lapsed certificate takes your site offline. Journey — multi-step HTTP flow monitor that checks a sequence of pages or API calls in order, stops at the first failure, and names the exact step that broke. Sitemap Link Monitor — reads your sitemap.xml and checks every listed URL on a schedule using lightweight HEAD requests, with consolidated alerts and scan diff. SSL Expiry, Journey, and Sitemap Link Monitor are available on paid plans only.

Checks run from multiple geographic locations simultaneously. A monitor is only marked DOWN when all regions agree it is unreachable — this eliminates false alerts from regional network blips.

MonitorGiant sends an alert immediately to every channel configured in the monitor's notification profile — email, Slack, Telegram, or any other channel you have set up. All channels fire simultaneously. When the monitor recovers, a recovery alert is sent to every channel and includes the total downtime duration.

The Free plan supports 1 user seat (the account owner). Paid plans include multiple seats — contact us at [email protected] to discuss team access.

Paid plans are live — visit the Pricing page for current plan details and feature breakdowns. Start free with 25 monitors and upgrade when you need more.

AI and Cloud monitors are a paid add-on to MonitorGiant's free uptime monitoring. They track your AI provider usage and costs, detect quality issues in AI responses, monitor cloud spending across AWS, GCP, and Azure, and check the health of MCP servers — giving you observability beyond simple uptime.

AI and Cloud monitors are priced per monitor per month. Contact us at [email protected] for current pricing and to discuss which monitors are right for your team.

Yes — you provide a read-only API key or cost-reader access for each provider you want to monitor. We provide step-by-step guides for creating a safe, limited-access key for each provider. MonitorGiant only reads usage and cost data — it never makes changes to your account.

Yes. Each quality check sends a prompt to your AI provider using your API key, which consumes tokens at their standard rate. The default check interval is 30 minutes — we recommend keeping it at 30 minutes or longer to manage costs. You are in full control of the check frequency.

A Circuit Breaker is an action that fires automatically when MonitorGiant detects an abnormal usage spike. You configure either a webhook (a signed call to your own endpoint so your systems can respond automatically) or an email alert. MonitorGiant does not revoke API keys directly — it notifies you or calls your configured webhook so you stay in control.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers power AI agents by exposing tools and data to AI models. MonitorGiant's MCP Health Monitor performs a three-layer check: it verifies the server is reachable, the MCP protocol is responding correctly, and the tools are available — so you know your AI agent infrastructure is fully operational.

Platform Health Monitors connect to your self-hosted applications — WordPress, WooCommerce, Ghost, Nextcloud, Keycloak, Odoo, ERPNext, and more — using each platform's own built-in API. Instead of just checking if the server responds, MonitorGiant checks if the application is actually working: database connectivity, background job health, checkout function, queue depth, plugin status, and more.

No. MonitorGiant uses your platform's built-in REST API or health endpoints. You generate a read-only API token from your platform's admin panel and paste it into MonitorGiant. No code to install, no plugin to maintain, no compatibility issues with platform updates.

Yes — with the right precautions. We recommend creating a dedicated read-only token specifically for MonitorGiant rather than reusing an existing admin key. MonitorGiant encrypts your credentials with AES-256 and only uses them to call the specific health endpoints we document for each platform. You can revoke access at any time from your platform's admin panel.

MonitorGiant verifies your checkout page loads correctly and contains the expected form elements. It also reads the WooCommerce system status API, which returns PHP version, MySQL version, installed plugin list, filesystem permissions, and environment configuration — giving you a complete picture of whether your store is configured correctly, not just whether it is online.

UptimeRobot and Pingdom check whether your server responds. MonitorGiant Platform Health Monitors check whether your application is working correctly. A WordPress site with a failed cron job, a broken WooCommerce checkout, or an outdated plugin with a known vulnerability will still return HTTP 200 — and UptimeRobot will report it as UP. MonitorGiant will report the specific failures.

MonitorGiant currently monitors 24 self-hosted platforms: WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento 2, Ghost, Nextcloud, Odoo, Keycloak, Moodle, ERPNext, Discourse, Gitea, Matomo, Rocket.Chat, MinIO, Strapi, Drupal, Joomla, OpenCart, WHMCS, Portainer, Coolify, MediaWiki, and Rocket.Chat Deep. Contact us at [email protected] if you need a platform that is not listed.

Platform Health Monitors are a paid add-on, priced per monitor per month. Contact us at [email protected] for current pricing. We will walk you through which monitors are right for your stack.

Yes. Telegram, Discord, ntfy, and Gotify are included on the free plan. There is no trial period — they are free forever. Create a Telegram bot with @BotFather, add it to your channel or group, and paste your bot token and chat ID into MonitorGiant. Alerts arrive within seconds of a monitor going down.

Yes. When a monitor recovers, MonitorGiant automatically sends a resolve event to PagerDuty using the same dedup key as the original trigger. PagerDuty closes the incident automatically — your team does not need to manually resolve it. The same auto-close behaviour applies to Opsgenie.

Yes. Each notification profile can include multiple channels simultaneously — for example, email AND Slack AND Telegram. When a monitor goes down, every configured channel fires at the same time. You can also assign different notification profiles to different monitors.

A Journey monitor walks through a sequence of HTTP requests in order — exactly as a real user navigates your site. Each step has its own URL, expected status code, and optional keyword check. MonitorGiant runs all steps in order, stops at the first failure, and tells you exactly which step broke and why. For example: Homepage → Product page → Cart → Checkout → Place order. If Checkout returns a blank screen, you get an alert naming that specific step — not just "site is down." Journey monitors are available on paid plans and include 3 one-click templates for e-commerce checkout, SaaS sign-up, and API sequences.

A Sitemap Link Monitor reads your sitemap.xml file and checks every listed URL on a schedule, using lightweight HTTP HEAD requests — no full page load, no server overhead. Broken links (4xx errors), server errors (5xx), and redirect chains are detected and reported as a single consolidated alert per scan, not one notification per broken URL. The monitor also logs a scan diff showing which URLs were added to or removed from your sitemap since the last check. Sitemap Link Monitor is a paid add-on, starting at $8/month for up to 50 links.

A standard uptime monitor checks one URL at a time, continuously, and alerts immediately when it goes down. A Sitemap Link Monitor checks many URLs (your entire sitemap) on a slower schedule and reports all findings in one consolidated summary. It is designed to catch broken links across a large site — a problem that uptime monitoring alone will not detect, since a single 404 on a blog post does not take your main domain offline. Both complement each other: uptime monitoring for real-time outages, sitemap monitoring for link health across your content.

No. MonitorGiant uses HTTP HEAD requests, which verify that a URL exists and returns a valid status code without downloading the page body, images, or scripts. This is how search engine crawlers behave. Even a sitemap with 500 URLs generates minimal server load, spread across the scan window.

Yes. MonitorGiant supports 17 notification channels versus 8 in UptimeRobot. MonitorGiant uniquely supports ntfy, Gotify, Google Chat, Zapier, Make (Integromat), Splunk On-Call, Zulip, Rocket.Chat, and HMAC-signed webhooks. Five channels are free on MonitorGiant (Email, Telegram, Discord, ntfy, Gotify) versus only one on UptimeRobot (Email). PagerDuty and Opsgenie also auto-resolve incidents on recovery — UptimeRobot does not.

Yes. Both Zapier and Make (formerly Integromat) are supported as paid notification channels. Configure a webhook trigger in Zapier or Make, paste the webhook URL into MonitorGiant, and any DOWN or RECOVER event becomes a trigger for any automation you build — Airtable, Notion, HubSpot, Google Sheets, SMS, or your own internal systems. No code required on the MonitorGiant side.