Frequently Asked Questions

Every new StatusPulse account receives a 14-day Starter Plan trial with full access to 20 uptime checks, 60-second intervals, and all notification channels. No credit card is required. At the end of day 14, your account downgrades to the Free tier (3 checks, 5-minute intervals) unless you add a payment method and select a paid plan. You'll receive email reminders at day 10 and day 13.

Yes. Switching from monthly to annual applies a prorated credit to your existing balance and charges the annual amount immediately. Switching from annual to monthly is possible but does not generate a refund for the remaining months — your annual billing period continues until its anniversary date, after which monthly billing begins. Contact billing@statuspulse.io if you need an exception due to a corporate contract change.

We accept Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover via Stripe. Enterprise customers on the Custom plan can pay by wire transfer or ACH with NET-30 terms. PayPal is not currently supported. All invoices are generated automatically and available under Settings → Billing → Invoices.

StatusPulse maintains a 99.95% platform SLA. If our monitoring infrastructure experiences an outage that exceeds the SLA threshold for a given calendar month, you receive a credit equal to 10% of your monthly plan cost for every 0.1% below the SLA. Credits are applied automatically to your next invoice. You can request manual review by emailing billing@statuspulse.io with the incident ID from our public status page.

Navigate to Settings → Billing → Tax Settings and enter your VAT/GST number. Invoices will display "Reverse Charge" for EU VAT IDs or show tax-exempt status for valid U.S. resale certificates. Changes take effect at the next billing cycle. For historical invoice re-issuance, email billing@statuspulse.io with your organization name and the invoice number.

The minimum interval is 60 seconds on the Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plans. The Free tier enforces a 5-minute minimum. Intervals shorter than 60 seconds are not supported because they generate excessive load on our global probe network and increase false-positive rates from transient network blips. If you need sub-60-second monitoring for a critical endpoint, consider pairing StatusPulse with a server-side health check that reports back via our webhook API.

Free: 3 checks. Starter: 20 checks. Pro: 100 checks. Enterprise: unlimited checks (subject to a fair-use policy of 2,000 checks per account unless negotiated otherwise). Each check can monitor one endpoint — if you need to monitor multiple paths on the same host (e.g., /health and /api/v2/status), each path counts as a separate check.

StatusPulse operates probes in 14 regions: US East (Ashburn, VA), US West (San Jose, CA), EU West (Frankfurt, DE), EU Central (London, UK), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, JP), Asia Pacific (Singapore, SG), South America (São Paulo, BR), Middle East (Dubai, AE), India (Mumbai, IN), Australia (Sydney, AU), Canada (Toronto, ON), Japan (Osaka, JP), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, BR), and South Korea (Seoul, KR). Pro and Enterprise plans can select specific probe regions per check; Starter plans use automatic region assignment.

SSL monitoring is included on every plan for HTTP/HTTPS checks. StatusPulse tracks certificate expiry, issuer chain validity, and key strength. You receive a warning alert 30 days before expiry, a critical alert 7 days before expiry, and a final critical alert 24 hours before expiry. If the certificate expires, the check status changes to DOWN. SSL monitoring does not count as a separate check — it runs alongside your existing HTTPS uptime checks.

No. All StatusPulse probes are cloud-hosted and cannot reach private IP ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) or non-routable addresses. To monitor internal services, deploy a StatusPulse Agent (available for Linux and Windows) on a machine that has network access to your internal endpoints. The agent forwards check results securely to the StatusPulse platform over TLS. Agents are included on Pro and Enterprise plans.

A false positive occurs when StatusPulse marks a check as DOWN despite the endpoint being reachable. Common causes include: TLS handshake timeouts under high load, DNS resolution delays from a specific probe region, or the endpoint returning a 503 during a brief deployment window. To reduce false positives: (1) increase the failure threshold from 1 to 2 or 3 consecutive failures before triggering an alert, (2) exclude probe regions that consistently show latency spikes, or (3) configure a maintenance window during known deployment times.

StatusPulse supports Slack (incoming webhooks and App-level events), PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Victor Ops, email, SMS (via Twilio), webhooks (custom POST endpoints), and Discord. Each notification channel is configured under Settings → Alerting → Channels. The Free tier includes 1 channel; Starter includes 3; Pro includes 10; Enterprise includes unlimited channels.

Escalation policies let you define a sequence of notification steps with time-based delays. For example: Step 1 — send a Slack message to #ops-alerts immediately. Step 2 — if unresolved after 15 minutes, SMS the on-call engineer. Step 3 — if unresolved after 45 minutes, page the engineering manager via PagerDuty. Each step can target different channels and recipients. Escalation policies are available on Pro and Enterprise plans. You can create up to 5 policies on Pro and unlimited on Enterprise.

Yes. StatusPulse automatically deduplicates alerts for the same check. If a check fails at 02:14 UTC and remains down, you will receive one initial alert. Subsequent status changes while the check is still down do not generate new notifications. When the check recovers, a single recovery notification is sent. If the check flaps (down → up → down within 5 minutes), StatusPulse suppresses the second down alert and extends the original incident window. This behavior is controlled by the Deduplication Window setting, defaulting to 5 minutes and adjustable from 1 to 30 minutes.

Quiet hours can be configured per notification channel. Set a start and end time in your local timezone, and StatusPulse will suppress all non-critical alerts during that window. Critical alerts (checks that have been DOWN for more than 10 minutes) bypass quiet hours and always deliver. Quiet hours are available on Starter, Pro, and Enterprise plans. Configure them under Settings → Alerting → Quiet Hours.

Webhook alerts send a POST request with a JSON body containing: check_id, check_name, status ("down" or "recovered"), response_time_ms, probe_region, timestamp, last_success, and failure_count. Example payload:

{
  "check_id": "chk_9f2a1b",
  "check_name": "api.example.com /health",
  "status": "down",
  "response_time_ms": null,
  "probe_region": "us-east-1",
  "timestamp": "2025-06-12T14:32:07Z",
  "last_success": "2025-06-12T14:31:07Z",
  "failure_count": 3
}

StatusPulse provides four roles:
Owner — full access including billing, plan changes, and account deletion.
Admin — manage checks, alerting, team members, and integrations; cannot delete the account or change billing.
Editor — create, edit, and pause checks; view dashboards and incident history; cannot manage team members or alerting channels.
Viewer — read-only access to dashboards, check status, and incident history.
Owners and Admins can assign roles under Settings → Team → Members. The Free tier supports 1 user; Starter supports up to 5; Pro up to 25; Enterprise is unlimited.

SAML 2.0 SSO is available on the Enterprise plan. Supported identity providers include Okta, Azure AD, OneLogin, and Auth0. Setup takes approximately 15 minutes: you provide your IdP's SSO metadata URL, and we configure the SP-side settings. After enabling SSO, team members log in via your IdP dashboard. Email/password login is disabled for all non-Owner accounts once SSO is active. Contact sales@statuspulse.io to add SSO to your Enterprise contract.

API keys are managed under Settings → Integrations → API Keys. Click Generate New Key to create a key scoped to your account. Each key displays once at creation — copy it immediately. You can tag keys (e.g., "CI/CD pipeline," "Internal dashboard") and set an optional expiration date. To rotate a key, generate a new one, update your integrations, then revoke the old key. Revoked keys are disabled immediately and cannot be recovered. You can have up to 10 active API keys per account.

Yes. StatusPulse supports data export in CSV and JSON formats. Under Settings → Data → Export, you can export: (1) uptime check history for any date range (up to 12 months on Pro, full history on Enterprise), (2) incident logs with resolution timestamps, and (3) response time metrics aggregated by minute, hour, or day. Exports are generated asynchronously and delivered to your registered email within 5–15 minutes depending on the data volume. Enterprise customers can also stream data to a custom S3 bucket or Kafka topic via our Data Pipeline feature.

Account deletion is irreversible. Navigate to Settings → Account → Delete Account. You will be prompted to confirm by typing your account email. Upon confirmation: all uptime checks are removed, notification channels are disconnected, API keys are revoked, and your team members are uninvited. Your data is retained for 30 days in a soft-delete state — you can contact support@statuspulse.io within that window to restore your account. After 30 days, all data is permanently purged from our systems in compliance with GDPR and CCPA.

Yes. StatusPulse provides a RESTful API (v2) for creating, updating, pausing, and deleting uptime checks, managing alerting channels, and querying incident history. The API is documented at docs.statuspulse.io/api and uses Bearer token authentication via your API key. Rate limits are 120 requests per minute on Starter, 600 per minute on Pro, and 2,000 per minute on Enterprise. SDKs are available for Python, Go, Node.js, and Ruby.