Why API Uptime Monitoring Matters

Your API is the backbone of your product. When it goes down, users get errors, revenue drops, and trust erodes — often before you even notice. Proactive uptime monitoring means you find out first, not your customers.

What You Should Monitor

Before setting up checks, decide what matters:

Check Type What It Detects
HTTP status code 4xx/5xx errors, server crashes
Response time Slowdowns, timeouts
Response body Logic errors returning wrong data
SSL certificate Expiring certs before they kill HTTPS

At minimum, monitor your healthcheck endpoint and any endpoint your users hit on the critical path (login, checkout, data fetch).

Setting Up a Monitor in Valpero

1. Add your endpoint

Go to Monitors → New monitor and enter your API URL:

https://api.yourapp.com/health

Set the check interval — 60 seconds is a good default for production APIs. For critical payment or auth endpoints, go down to 30 seconds.

2. Configure the expected response

Tell Valpero what a healthy response looks like:

  • Status code: 200 (or 204 for endpoints that return no body)
  • Keyword match: optionally assert the response contains "status":"ok" — this catches cases where your server returns 200 but the app is broken
  • Timeout: set to 5000ms — if your API takes longer, that's already a problem

3. Set up alerts

Go to Settings → Notifications and connect at least two channels:

  • Email — for a paper trail
  • Telegram or Slack — for immediate awareness

Enable down + recovery alerts so you know when the incident starts and ends.

4. Test your monitor

Click Check now right after saving. You should see a green response with status 200 and a latency reading. If it fails, double-check:

  • Is the endpoint publicly reachable? (no VPN/IP whitelist blocking Valpero probes)
  • Does it require an Authorization header? Use the custom headers field.

Monitoring APIs That Require Authentication

For protected endpoints, add a static API key in the Request headers field:

Authorization: Bearer your-read-only-api-key

Use a read-only key with minimal permissions — never expose admin credentials in a monitoring config.

What Good Response Times Look Like

Latency Verdict
< 200 ms Excellent
200–500 ms Acceptable
500 ms–1 s Investigate
> 1 s Alert immediately

Set a performance alert threshold at 1000ms so you catch degradation before it becomes downtime.

Setting Up a Status Page

Once your monitors are running, create a public Status Page (under Status Pages in the sidebar). Share the URL with your users — it builds trust and reduces support tickets during incidents.

Checklist

  • [ ] Healthcheck endpoint added and returning 200
  • [ ] Check interval set to 60s or less
  • [ ] At least 2 alert channels configured
  • [ ] Recovery alerts enabled
  • [ ] Custom headers added for authenticated endpoints
  • [ ] Status page published

Next Steps

With your API monitored, consider adding:

  • SSL expiry alerts — Valpero checks your certificate automatically
  • Multi-region probes — confirm the API is reachable from US, EU and Asia
  • Incident postmortems — document what went wrong and how you fixed it