Uptime monitor user agents
Uptime and synthetic monitoring tools repeatedly request your site to check availability and response time. Tools such as UptimeRobot and Pingdom usually identify themselves in the user agent. Their traffic is expected, periodic, and automated. This page explains how to recognise it and keep it out of human analytics.
What monitoring traffic looks like
Uptime and synthetic monitors send requests on a fixed schedule to verify your site is up and responding within expected times. The hallmark is regularity: the same URLs hit at a steady interval from the monitoring provider.
Many monitors let you set a custom user agent, but by default they identify themselves with a recognisable token and often a link to the provider.
- Regular, periodic requests to a fixed set of URLs
- Self-identifying token (e.g. an UptimeRobot or Pingdom identifier)
- Often configurable to a custom user agent
Why you should keep it out of human metrics
Monitoring hits are expected operational traffic. Counting them as visits inflates page views and can create misleading patterns, especially on low-traffic pages where a one-minute check cadence dominates.
Check each provider's documentation for the exact default token, since these can change, and match on the stable identifier rather than a full version string.
How it appears in analytics and logs
Periodic requests from a monitoring token (such as an UptimeRobot or Pingdom identifier) are health checks, not visits. A steady cadence to a fixed set of URLs is the signature of a monitor.
Diagnostic use case
Recognise monitoring traffic so regular health-check requests are counted as automation and do not distort human analytics or look like a traffic pattern.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies recognisable monitoring agents server-side as monitoring bots, separate from human analytics, so health checks are visible but never counted as audience.
Common mistakes
- Counting periodic health checks as human page views.
- Forgetting a custom-configured monitor UA when reconciling traffic.
- Mistaking a steady monitor cadence for a genuine traffic trend.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Monitoring agents carry no visitor identity; they describe a checking tool. WebmasterID records monitor hits as bot events, never as human profiles.
Related pages
- Social preview bot user agents
When someone pastes your link into a social or messaging app, a preview bot fetches the page to build a card from your Open Graph and Twitter Card tags. Bots like facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, Slackbot, Discordbot, and LinkedInBot identify themselves by token. This page covers what they are and why they hit you.
- curl, wget and script user agents
Command-line and library HTTP clients send a default user agent that names the tool: curl/x.y, Wget, python-requests, Go-http-client, and similar. These are scripts, not browsers, and seeing them is normal. This page explains the patterns and how to treat them without over- or under-reacting.
- Website observability
See automated checks and real traffic in their proper categories.
Sources and verification notes
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.