Create a Monitor

This guide walks you through creating a monitor in Garmingo Status and explains each field, plan limits, and how the platform treats the values you provide.

Prerequisites

• A Status Instance (workspace) already created.
• Sufficient remaining monitor quota on your plan.
• (Optional) At least one Status Page if you want to surface the monitor publicly.

Plan‑Based Limits

Your subscription plan enforces hard limits when creating a monitor:

• Monitors: Maximum count depends on the plan (e.g. Free: 3, Starter: 10, Standard: 50, Business: 300).
• Minimum Interval (TTL): The shortest allowed check interval (in seconds). Example: Free = 300s, Starter = 60s, Standard = 20s.
• Max Retries: Currently fixed at 5 across most plans (some monitor types disable retries entirely).

If you exceed the monitor quota or provide a TTL below the allowed minimum, creation will be rejected.

Supported Monitor Types

See the dedicated “Monitor Types” section for deep dives and type‑specific settings.

Field Reference (Request Body)

If you use the API directly, you send a JSON body that follows this structure (simplified overview):

{
	"displayName": string (1..64 chars, required),
	"type": one of the supported type identifiers (required),
	"settings": object (type‑specific keys),
	"ttl": number (seconds) >= plan.minTTL and <= 86400, default 60*,
	"retries": number 0..10 (ignored / forced to 0 for heartbeat & manual),
	"region": deployment region identifier (defaults eu-central),
	"proxyType": null | one of supported proxies for the type, optional,
	"proxyHost": string | null,
	"proxyPort": number | null,
	"proxyUsername": string | null,
	"proxyPassword": string | null,
	"metadata": object (freeform; heartbeat token auto‑injected),
	"keywords": string[] (max 10, HTTP keyword / content assertions),
	"enabled": boolean (default true)
}

*NOTE: The default 60s is further raised to the plan minimum if your plan’s minTTL is larger.

Regions

Current region identifiers (may expand): eu-central, eu-central-2, eu-west, na-north, us-east, us-west, as-south, oc-east. Pick the region closest to the target for latency‑sensitive monitoring.

Proxies

Only certain monitor types permit proxies:

• HTTP: http, https, socks5
• TCP / UDP: socks5
• Others: none

If you pass an empty string for proxyType, it is normalized to null.

Heartbeat Monitor Special Flow

1. Create a monitor with type: "heartbeat" and (optionally) a schedule setting to document expected cadence.
2. Retrieve the generated heartbeat token (UI or API if exposed) and call the heartbeat endpoint from your cron/job runner before the TTL expires.
3. Missing a heartbeat beyond the allowed interval marks it unhealthy.

Manual Monitor Special Flow

Manual monitors do not actively probe. Their status is set through explicit user / API updates—use this for external dependencies or business processes.

Audit Logging

Every create/update generates a structured diff entry (original vs changed keys, excluding immutable identifiers). When no effective changes exist, no update log entry is stored.

Best Practices

• Start with a higher TTL (e.g. 120–300s) then decrease based on reliability needs to conserve quota headroom.
• Use keyword assertions sparingly—limit to one unambiguous phrase to reduce false negatives.
• Group related monitors by consistent naming prefixes (e.g. api-auth, api-orders) to improve search relevance.
• For geographically distributed services, create separate monitors per region rather than relying solely on a single origin check.

Next Steps

• Learn about Monitor Types specifics.
• Explore filtering & search in the Monitors Introduction.
• Set up Incidents and Maintenance Windows to communicate downtime.