Uptime monitoring types compared

Miterl ships with five monitor types — HTTP, Keyword, DOM Integrity, Heartbeat, and SSL — each guarding a different layer of your stack. This page summarises what each type catches (and misses) so you can pick the right one for sites, batches, SEO assets, and certificates.

At-a-glance comparison

Type	What it checks	Catches	Misses	Best for
HTTP	HTTP status code / response time	5xx errors / timeouts / DNS failures	Visual breakage / missing SEO tags	Baseline for any public site
Keyword	Whether response body contains target text	Error pages from DB outages / auth failures / maintenance pages	Broken images or CSS	Behind-login pages or success-text checks
DOM Integrity	title / canonical / og:image / noindex tags	noindex incidents / lost OGP / broken canonicals	Server outages — pair with HTTP	Media, LPs, corporate sites
Heartbeat	Whether a periodic ping arrives from your batch	Batch stoppages / cron failures / stuck jobs	Site-level outages — combine with HTTP checks	Nightly batches, cron jobs, scheduled tasks
SSL	TLS certificate expiry and chain health	Expiring or broken certificates	Content itself — pair with HTTP / DOM	All HTTPS sites (incl. Let's Encrypt)

POINT

HTTP catches “site is down,” Keyword/DOM Integrity catch “page content broke,” Heartbeat catches “the batch stopped,” and SSL catches “the certificate is about to expire.” Production setups commonly stack HTTP + DOM Integrity + SSL on the same URL.

Each type, in depth

1. HTTP monitoring

Sends requests to a target URL and records status codes and response time. Miterl checks from multiple regions (Tokyo / Singapore) so regional outages are also caught.

Recommended interval: 1–3 minutes (Pro: 30 seconds)
Best for: public sites and API endpoints
Common false alarms: transient network spikes — tune retry thresholds

2. Keyword monitoring

Checks whether the response body contains a required keyword (or does NOT contain a forbidden one). Catches cases where the server returns 200 OK but the page itself shows an error — e.g. a Laravel exception page during DB outages.

Required keyword examples: “My account” after login, “Thank you for your order” on confirmation
Forbidden keyword examples: “Whoops, looks like something went wrong”, “Database connection failed”

3. DOM Integrity monitoring

Parses HTML and validates SEO-critical tags such as title, canonical, og:image, noindex, and robots. Prevents post-deploy disasters like a stray noindex or a missing OGP image breaking your share previews.

Checked tags: title, description, canonical, og:title, og:image, robots, noindex
Best for: media, LPs, corporate sites, blogs

4. Heartbeat monitoring

Your batch pings a Miterl-issued URL on completion. Miterl watches whether the ping arrives within the expected interval. Catches batch- and cron-level failures that external monitoring cannot see.

Interval examples: 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week
Tunable grace periods avoid false alarms on slow runs

5. SSL monitoring

Periodically validates TLS certificate expiry and intermediate chain integrity. Prevents the “Let's Encrypt auto-renew silently broke” class of incidents. Typical alerts fire 30 and 7 days before expiry.

Alert timings: 30 days, 7 days, and after expiry
Covers wildcards and SAN certificates

How to combine them

Pattern A: Baseline (corporate / LP / blog)

HTTP + DOM Integrity + SSL — covers “down,” “broken content,” and “certificate expiring.”

Pattern B: E-commerce / checkout flows

Pattern A plus Keyword monitoring. Watch the post-checkout success message specifically — so you know when revenue-impacting flows break, not just the homepage.

Pattern C: SaaS / API backend

HTTP across multiple endpoints + Heartbeat for nightly/batch jobs + SSL. DOM Integrity is usually unnecessary here.

Pattern D: Agency maintenance fleet (50–200 sites)

HTTP + SSL on every site, DOM Integrity only on SEO-critical accounts. Use Workspaces to segment by customer and route alerts.

NOTE

Stacking monitors is safer — but more alerts can become noise. Miterl collapses concurrent incidents on the same URL into a single notification, so layering HTTP and DOM Integrity on the same target won’t flood you.

FAQ

Q. Can I attach multiple types to one URL?

Yes. HTTP + DOM Integrity + SSL on the same URL is the most common setup.

Q. Which type fits internal systems behind a VPN?

Heartbeat is ideal — your server pings outward, so VPN/firewall restrictions don’t block monitoring.

Q. How do I avoid duplicate alerts?

Miterl collapses concurrent incidents on the same URL into one. You can also set notification suppression rules.

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