Pingdom bot — uptime/performance monitor
Pingdom (SolarWinds) is an uptime and performance monitoring service that fetches your pages on a schedule to check availability and speed. Its requests are automated monitoring, not search indexing or human visits. Pingdom documents its checks and the identifiers operators can use to recognise them.
What this means
Pingdom is a synthetic monitoring service that periodically requests your pages or endpoints to verify they are up and to measure response time. The requests are generated by Pingdom's infrastructure, not by people, and they do not index your site or feed any search engine.
Monitoring checks are typically regular and predictable — for example one request every minute to a health-check URL — which is what distinguishes them from organic crawler waves or human sessions.
How Pingdom checks identify themselves
Pingdom's uptime checks include a Pingdom identifier in their user-agent string, and Pingdom documents the user agents used by its checks. Because performance checks may use a real browser engine (and therefore a browser-like UA) and check sources can change, this entry is marked partially verified — match on the documented Pingdom identifier but confirm current values in Pingdom's documentation.
The user agent is a claim that can be copied; verify where authenticity matters.
- User agent contains a Pingdom identifier (uptime checks)
- Performance checks may present a browser-like user agent
- Synthetic monitoring traffic, not a search-engine crawler
Handling Pingdom in analytics and robots.txt
The main task with Pingdom is classification, not blocking: keep its checks out of human analytics so uptime traffic does not inflate page views. Blocking is usually counterproductive because it would defeat your own monitoring.
If you must restrict Pingdom from certain paths, you can target its identifier in robots.txt where supported, but most operators simply exclude monitoring sources from human-facing metrics. robots.txt is a request honoured by compliant clients, not an access-control mechanism.
How it appears in analytics and logs
A request from Pingdom is a scheduled availability or performance check fetching a URL — a bot event, not a human visit. These hits are usually regular and low-volume, targeting the pages or endpoints you configured for monitoring.
Diagnostic use case
Recognise Pingdom uptime/performance checks in logs so they are not counted as human visits, and confirm the monitoring is configured as expected.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies Pingdom checks server-side as monitoring-bot traffic and surfaces them on the bot-intelligence surface, separate from human analytics, so synthetic uptime checks do not inflate your audience numbers.
Common mistakes
- Counting Pingdom uptime checks as human page views, inflating low-traffic metrics.
- Blocking Pingdom and unintentionally disabling your own uptime monitoring.
- Assuming all Pingdom checks share one UA when performance checks may differ.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Pingdom check detection uses only the request user-agent (and, where applicable, documented check sources). No human identity is involved. WebmasterID records the check as a bot event, separate from human analytics, and never attaches it to a visitor profile.
Related pages
- UptimeRobot bot — uptime monitoring checks
UptimeRobot is an uptime monitoring service that requests your URLs at intervals to confirm they respond. Its requests are automated availability checks, not search indexing or human visits. UptimeRobot identifies its monitor in the user agent so operators can recognise its checks.
- ContentKing crawler — real-time SEO monitor
ContentKing, now part of Conductor, is a real-time SEO monitoring tool whose crawler continuously checks pages for changes in content, indexability, and on-page health. It is a third-party SEO tool crawler, not a search engine. ContentKing documents its crawler and supports robots.txt handling.
- Fake search-bot traffic
Because search-engine crawlers are widely allowed, abusive clients copy the Googlebot or Bingbot user-agent string to slip past rules meant for real crawlers. This fake search-bot traffic is identified by verifying the source: genuine crawlers pass reverse-DNS and published-IP checks, spoofed ones do not.
- Website observability
See monitoring-bot checks against your pages, separate from humans.
Sources and verification notes
- Pingdom (SolarWinds) — documentationPingdom documents its uptime/performance checks and user agents; verify current identifiers in its docs.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.