uptimerobot.com - can you trust the results?

I started using Uptime Robot a couple of weeks ago and really like the price and simplicity of UI, but some of the results just don't make sense to me. For example, I see really big bursts in ping time (up to a few seconds) but no increase in HTTP response time for the same periods at the same site... bizarre.

I am curious to hear what kind of experience others have when using UR.

 

You probably can't trust these . I used pingdom and uptime robot for the same sites/pages and the response time charts for the same periods differ significantly. The results from pingdom are always better in terms of measured response times, sometimes they look too good (as they don't correspond to respond times shown by GA).
Results from uptimerobot show a lot of spikes but when I compare these with the data (from uptimerobot) for other pages or pings the match is not there - this makes me very suspicious. IMHO, all these measuring tools are only good for checking if your site is up, I don't trust their response time measurements (based on my analysis of collected data).

 

It works perfectly for me. It depends on how you set it up. Make sure you tell it to check port 80/443 on your server and it does it's job.

 

Can you explain please (re "how you set it up")? For example, I don't see any settings in UptimeRobot that allow specifying the port... They really only allow 2 settings: URL (or IP) and monitoring interval.

 

Click "Add New Monitor" > Select "Port" and fill in your details.

 

I wouldn't exactly "rely" on the results provided by such tools as uptime robot, however as a means for added monitoring sure. Some utilize Uptime Robot along side Nagios, Pingdom and an in-house solution. Someone ask if this excessive, however some look at quad-redundancy in monitoring their customers. There are a lot of solutions out there that you can utilize for your business as well to monitor the uptime and response of your system(s).

 

Got it. Thanks @Krotix-Geek.

 

Pingdom and Uptime Robot are pretty good. We've also been testing out StatusCake and been very happy with how it works. Just make sure your server firewalls aren't blocking the uptime checkers, as it may register the server as being down but it was really just bocked by the firewall

 

We have no problem with Uptimerobot. Please ensure you add their IPs to your server firewall, and it will not be trouble with you!

 

I am using Uptimerobot since few months and results are just fine. Can't say they are accurate but useful to track uptime.