Watch a Server and Get Alerted When It Goes Down

Uptime Monitor, part of Netutilus Pro, checks your hosts from this Mac and records every check.

1. Add a target

Click Add Target, give it a name, and pick a Check Type:

• HTTP(S) for a website or an API: the page must answer with an expected status code, and optionally contain a piece of text.
• TCP Connect or Port Check for a service such as SSH, a database or a game server.
• Ping (ICMP) for a router or a device that answers ping.
• SSL Certificate, to be warned before a certificate expires.

Set the Check Interval: every minute is plenty for most sites.

2. Start monitoring

Click Start Monitoring, and allow notifications when macOS asks. You’re notified when:

• the host is down, after several failed checks in a row (three by default), so a single lost check doesn’t page you;
• it recovers, with how long it was down;
• it answers slower than the Latency alert you set;
• its certificate is about to expire.

3. Keep it running

Checks run while Netutilus runs, even with its window closed: the menu bar item shows their status. The Mac has to be awake, so in Settings › Network, Keep this Mac awake while monitoring can keep it from going to sleep, always or only on the power adapter.

On a hotspot or another metered connection, targets on your local network pause, since they can’t be reached from there. That keeps false outages out of their history.

4. Read the history

Select a target for its history: a status bar and a latency chart for the hour, day, week or month, and a list of every outage with its start and end. Export turns any period into a PDF report.

Related

• Uptime Monitor.
• SSL Certificate and Certificates.