01
The route returns the wrong status
A deploy flips a 200 to a 500 or a silent 401. The page loads, the API does not, and orders quietly stop.
API monitoring
PulseStack watches every endpoint for status code, response time and availability, and pages you the moment a route starts failing. Attach custom headers to reach authenticated routes, not just the public ones.
Free plan and 14-day trial, both with no card. All nine monitor types from GBP 9 a month.
Live HTTP request from our network - the same check PulseStack runs as often as every 30 seconds.
signals per check: status code, response time, availability
fastest check interval on Pro, Team and Enterprise
native alert channels, on failure and recovery
request headers to monitor authenticated routes
A 200 on the homepage tells you nothing about the API your product actually runs on. These are the failures that slip past a basic uptime check.
A deploy flips a 200 to a 500 or a silent 401. The page loads, the API does not, and orders quietly stop.
The endpoint still answers but takes six seconds, and timeouts cascade through every service that depends on it. PulseStack charts response time per location, so you can see the slowdown building.
A rotated key or lapsed token locks out an integration. Without a header-aware check, you never see it fail.
A third-party API your route calls falls over. Your endpoint returns errors it did not cause and you get blamed.
The endpoint works from your office but fails for users elsewhere. A check from one place misses it. PulseStack checks from London, New York and Sydney and marks it down when two locations agree.
Support tickets become your monitoring. By the time someone reports it, the damage to trust is already done.
No agent to install, no SDK to import. Give PulseStack a URL and a header, and the first check runs immediately.
Setup takes minutes, not a sprint. Here is the whole flow.
Paste the URL of the route you want watched. GET, health check or a real business endpoint.
Add a bearer token or API key so the check hits authenticated routes exactly as your app does.
Choose the request method, the expected status code and the check interval.
Pick channels: Slack, PagerDuty, SMS and more. Alerts fire on failure and again on recovery.
Each cycle, PulseStack sends the request with your headers, reads the response and records the result. Here is what a healthy check looks like next to a failing one.
No add-on tiers for the basics. These come with the monitor.
Run your API checks alongside everything else that keeps your product online, from one account, including SSL certificate, DNS record and domain expiry monitors.
Page and endpoint availability by status code and response time.
Confirm a word or phrase is present, or flag when it appears.
TCP connection check to any host and port.
Watch a specific port and the service listening on it.
Status code, response time and availability with custom headers.
Cron and background jobs that must check in on schedule.
Add your endpoint, route alerts to Slack, and let PulseStack watch the endpoints you cannot afford to lose.
Where a PulseStack API monitor sits against a rough homemade check or a status page you refresh by hand.
| Capability | A cron + curl script | Manual checking | PulseStack API monitor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status code and response time tracked | If you build it | No | Built in |
| Custom headers for auth routes | Manual | No | Yes |
| Re-test and multi-location confirmation | Rarely | No | Built in |
| Failure and recovery alerts | You wire it | No | Eight channels |
| Multi-location checks | No | No | Yes |
| Public status page and incident history | No | No | Included |
| Setup time | Hours | Ongoing effort | Minutes |
Watch health checks and business-critical routes with the same auth headers your services use, and catch a bad deploy before it spreads.
Third-party APIs fail on their schedule, not yours. Monitor the routes you depend on and know instantly when an upstream goes dark.
Re-tests and two-location confirmation cut the noise, PagerDuty and Slack routing gets the right person, and recovery alerts close the loop without a manual all-clear.
Every API monitor can fire through any of these, on failure and again on recovery, once a failure is confirmed from at least two locations.
API endpoint monitoring sends real HTTP requests to your API endpoints at regular intervals and checks what comes back. In PulseStack™, each API check sends one request with your method, headers and body, confirms that the expected status code is returned, and records how long the response took from each location. It catches an endpoint that starts returning errors, times out or stops answering, and the latency charts show an endpoint that is slowly getting slower.
After each request, PulseStack™ checks that the status code matches the one you expect, for example 200. If a different code comes back, or the request times out or cannot connect, the check is marked as failed, and an alert is sent once the failure is confirmed from at least two locations. API monitors do not parse JSON or check the response body. To confirm that specific text appears on a page, use a keyword monitor alongside it.
Yes. PulseStack™ supports Bearer tokens, API keys in headers or query parameters, Basic authentication, and custom header schemes. You can set any combination of request headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, or custom authentication headers your API requires. Credentials are encrypted at rest and never exposed in logs or the dashboard.
Synthetic monitoring typically refers to scripted multi-step browser transactions that simulate user journeys. API monitoring focuses on individual endpoint health: sending a request and validating the response. PulseStack™ API monitoring is single-request: you define the request (method, headers, body) and the status code you expect. PulseStack™ does not run scripted browser journeys. To check that key text appears on a page, use a keyword monitor, which fetches the HTML without running JavaScript.
When creating an API monitor, select POST as the HTTP method and enter your request body as raw JSON. Set the Content-Type header to application/json. PulseStack™ sends exactly the request you configure, including the body, and checks that the expected status code comes back. This works for any method: POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.
Yes. GraphQL APIs use POST requests with a JSON body containing the query. Create an API monitor with the POST method, set your endpoint URL, add the Content-Type: application/json header, and put your GraphQL query in the request body. PulseStack™ checks that the endpoint returns the status code you expect. Many GraphQL servers return 200 even when a query has errors, so a status check will not catch errors reported inside the response body.
PulseStack™ checks your API from 3 locations (London, New York and Sydney) simultaneously. If only one location reports a failure while the others succeed, it is not treated as an API outage. A monitor is only marked down when at least two of the three locations fail, and a failed check is re-tested a few seconds later before it counts. This cuts false alerts caused by transient routing problems, regional CDN issues, or monitoring-location-specific network blips.
Every check records how long the endpoint took to respond, from each location. The monitor page charts these times per location over your chosen range, with the average, fastest and slowest for each. Use the history to spot an endpoint that is slowly getting slower before your users notice.
Yes. Monitoring third-party APIs like Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, or OpenAI is one of the most common use cases. You cannot control their uptime, but you need to know immediately when they degrade. Create monitors for each external dependency and watch their response times per location in the charts. When a provider has an incident, you will often know before their status page updates.
The free plan includes 5 monitors, and each endpoint counts as one monitor. Free monitors are HTTP(S) checks, so dedicated API monitors with custom headers start on the Starter plan, which covers 50 monitors. Checks run every 5 minutes on the free plan, every 60 seconds on Starter and every 30 seconds on Pro, Team and Enterprise. The free plan includes email alerts, and PulseStack has 8 native alert channels in total.
Status code, response time and availability on every route, with the headers to reach the ones that matter. Start free, upgrade for API monitoring from GBP 9 a month.