Troubleshooting and FAQ

My site is down but PinWatch still says Up

PinWatch waits for 3 failed checks in a row before it marks a monitor Down. That protects you from alerts caused by a single blip. With a 5-minute interval, a real outage is confirmed in roughly 10 to 15 minutes.

If you need to know sooner, edit the monitor and choose a shorter Check Interval, such as 1 minute. See Manage your monitors.

My monitor keeps flipping between Up and Down

This is called flapping. It usually means the site is struggling rather than fully down. Common causes:

• Slow responses. A web check gives up after 30 seconds. A page that sometimes takes longer will sometimes fail.
• Rate limiting or bot protection. Some sites block or slow down automated visitors. Try adding a User-Agent under Custom Headers (JSON) when you create the monitor, or ask your host to allow the checks.
• An overloaded server. Open the monitor and look at the Response Time chart. A rising line is an early warning.

Because PinWatch needs 3 failures in a row before calling it down, and sends at most 3 down alerts per outage, flapping won’t flood your inbox. It’s still worth fixing the cause.

I’m not getting any alerts

Work through these in order:

1. Open https://pinwatch.oroe.ai/settings/notifications. Check Email Notifications is on and the Email Address is right. Select Save Settings.
2. Select Test Email. If the test doesn’t arrive, check your spam or junk folder.
3. On the monitor’s card at https://pinwatch.oroe.ai/monitors, select the Edit button. Make sure Email Alerts is ticked. For an uptime monitor, check Send alerts to if it’s filled in, because it overrides your account address.
4. Make sure the monitor isn’t Paused.
5. For keyword monitors, remember an alert only fires when the answer changes. See Watch a page for a keyword.

Test Email says it can’t send

The test uses your saved settings. Select Save Settings first, then try Test Email again.

The monitor says Down, but the site opens fine for me

Open the monitor and check the Events tab for the reason. Common ones:

• A certificate problem. An invalid or expired HTTPS certificate counts as down, even if your browser lets you click past the warning. Renew or fix the certificate.
• An HTTP error status, such as http_status_403 or http_status_503. Your site answered, but with an error. Some sites return errors to automated visitors. Try a User-Agent header.
• unresolvable. The domain name didn’t resolve. Check for typos and check your DNS.
• blocked_target. The address points at a private or internal network. PinWatch only checks public addresses.

Never checked won’t go away

A new monitor shows Never checked until its first check completes. That normally happens within a few minutes. If it stays that way, make sure the monitor isn’t paused. Then check the address is a full, public address, such as https://example.com rather than example.com for an HTTP(S) monitor.

My keyword monitor never fires

• Check the spelling and capital letters. Matching is exact.
• Use one phrase per monitor.
• Remember the first check never alerts, and an alert only fires when the phrase goes from absent to present (or present to absent).
• If the text is added to the page by JavaScript after it loads, PinWatch may not see it.

Why does “Create Monitor” save my email address for everything?

When you create an uptime monitor, the email you enter becomes your account’s alert address too. That keeps every monitor pointing at one place. To send one monitor’s alerts elsewhere, edit it and fill in Send alerts to. See Set up email alerts.

How long is history kept?

Individual check results are kept for 30 days, then cleared automatically.

Can I monitor something on my own private network?

No. PinWatch runs on the public internet and only checks public addresses. Private addresses, such as 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or localhost, are refused.