Monitor APIs

For APIs, Checks tend to be a bit urgent. If the API check fails, I know something is wrong, and needs investigating immediately.

I have OnlineOrNot check its own API every minute:

To make OnlineOrNot actually check the API correctly, I have OnlineOrNot make an API request as a real (test) user, with a valid GraphQL query.

I set the following HTTP request settings:

As GraphQL APIs can return 200 OK even when things are going horribly wrong, it's important to set assertions to check the data you queried is coming back correctly:

Finally, in advanced settings, I set the check to monitor from a location close to my database (for fastest results), and set it to only alert me if two checks in a row fail.

As I'm already checking the response via Assertions, I don't set 'Text to search for' for my API check.

Alert settings

As I check my phone (way too much), I find email notifications to work quite well when things go wrong (no additional settings required).

For added redundancy though, I also have alerts sent to Slack and Discord, which I've added as integrations for my account: