Monitor HTTP Endpoints

Overview

When your website, API, or internal service goes down, you want to know before your users do. This guide shows you how to set up lightweight synthetic monitoring for your HTTP endpoints in SigNoz — giving you uptime/ping monitoring, response time tracking, and error detection for any HTTP(S) URL.

What you'll achieve:

• Periodically check if your HTTP endpoints are reachable and returning expected responses
• Visualize endpoint health and response times in SigNoz dashboards
• Set up alerts that notify you when an endpoint goes down
• Optionally track SSL/TLS certificate expiry

This works by using the OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector — a lightweight agent that runs alongside your infrastructure. The Collector's HTTP Check Receiver makes periodic HTTP requests to your endpoints on a schedule and sends the results as metrics to SigNoz.

Prerequisites

• A server or VM to run the OpenTelemetry Collector (this is where the checks run from)
• Network access from the Collector host to the endpoints you want to monitor

Setup

Step 1: Install the OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector is an agent that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data. In this case, it will periodically ping your HTTP endpoints and send the results to SigNoz.

Install the OTel Collector on your server by following the Collector installation guide. The guide covers setup for Docker, Kubernetes, VM, and AWS ECS environments.

Step 2: Add the HTTP Check Receiver

The HTTP Check Receiver is a component that performs synthetic checks — it makes HTTP requests to your endpoints on a schedule and records whether they respond successfully.

Add the following to the receivers section of your OTel Collector configuration file (see where to find your config file):

receivers:
  httpcheck:
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://<your-endpoint>
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 60s

• <your-endpoint>: The URL you want to monitor (for example, https://api.example.com/health or https://yoursite.com)
• collection_interval: How often to check. Default is 60s. Use shorter intervals (for example, 30s) for critical endpoints
• method: The HTTP method to use. GET is most common for health checks

Step 3: Add the SigNoz Exporter (if not already configured)

If you followed the Collector installation guide, the SigNoz exporter is already configured — skip to Step 4.

Otherwise, add the SigNoz OTLP exporter to the exporters section of your config:

exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: "ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443"
    tls:
      insecure: false
    headers:
      "signoz-ingestion-key": "<your-ingestion-key>"

• <region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region
• <your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key

Step 4: Enable the HTTP Check in the Pipeline

In the service.pipelines.metrics section, add httpcheck to the list of receivers. Pipelines connect receivers, processors, and exporters — learn more in the service pipeline documentation.

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp, httpcheck]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]

Step 5: Restart the Collector

Apply the changes by restarting the OTel Collector. The restart command depends on how you deployed the Collector — refer to the environment-specific instructions in the Collector installation guide.

Validate

After restarting, wait for at least one collection_interval (default: 60 seconds) and then verify the data is flowing:

1. Go to your SigNoz Cloud dashboard
2. Navigate to Dashboards → New Dashboard → New Panel
3. In the Query Builder, search for httpcheck in the metric dropdown
4. You should see metrics like httpcheck.status, httpcheck.duration, and httpcheck.error

If you see these metrics, your HTTP endpoint monitoring is working.

Enable Optional Metrics

By default, the HTTP Check Receiver reports three metrics: httpcheck.status, httpcheck.duration, and httpcheck.error. You can enable additional metrics for deeper monitoring.

SSL/TLS Certificate Expiry

Track when your HTTPS certificates are about to expire — useful for avoiding unexpected downtime from expired certificates:

receivers:
  httpcheck:
    metrics:
      httpcheck.tls.cert_remaining:
        enabled: true
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://yoursite.com
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 3600s

The httpcheck.tls.cert_remaining metric reports the number of seconds until the certificate expires. A negative value means the certificate has already expired. You can set up an alert on this metric to get notified days before expiry.

Response Timing Breakdown

For performance monitoring, enable detailed timing metrics to see where time is spent during the request:

receivers:
  httpcheck:
    metrics:
      httpcheck.dns.lookup.duration:
        enabled: true
      httpcheck.client.connection.duration:
        enabled: true
      httpcheck.tls.handshake.duration:
        enabled: true
      httpcheck.client.request.duration:
        enabled: true
      httpcheck.response.duration:
        enabled: true
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://yoursite.com
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 60s

These metrics help identify whether slow responses are caused by DNS resolution, connection setup, TLS handshake, or server processing.

receivers:
  httpcheck:
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://api.example.com/health
        method: GET
      - endpoint: https://yoursite.com
        method: GET
      - endpoint: https://internal-service.local:8080/ping
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 60s

receivers:
  httpcheck/critical:
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://api.example.com/health
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 30s

  httpcheck/standard:
    targets:
      - endpoint: https://blog.example.com
        method: GET
      - endpoint: https://docs.example.com
        method: GET
    collection_interval: 300s

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp, httpcheck/critical, httpcheck/standard]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]

Create a Dashboard in SigNoz

Once metrics are flowing, create a dashboard to visualize endpoint health:

Step 1: Create a New Dashboard Panel

1. In SigNoz, go to Dashboards → New Dashboard
2. Click New Panel and select Time Series as the chart type

Step 2: Configure the Query

1. In the Query Builder, search for httpcheck.status
2. Add a WHERE clause: http.status_class = 2xx to filter for successful responses
3. Set Avg By to http.url to see each endpoint separately

Step 3: Interpret the Chart

The chart shows:

• Value of 1: Endpoint is healthy (returning 2xx responses)
• Value of 0: Endpoint is down or returning errors
• A separate line for each endpoint when grouped by http.url

Set Up Alerts

Get notified when an endpoint goes down by creating an alert:

Step 1: Create an Alert from the Dashboard

1. In your dashboard panel showing endpoint health, click the dropdown menu (⋮)
2. Select Create Alerts

Step 2: Configure Alert Conditions

Set the alert to fire when an endpoint stops returning 2xx responses:

Example alert configuration:

Metric: httpcheck.status
WHERE: http.status_class = 2xx
Avg By: http.url

Condition: below the threshold at least once during the last 5 mins
Threshold: 1

This alert fires when any monitored endpoint fails to respond with a 2xx (success) status code even once during a 5-minute window. You can configure the alert to send notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, email, or other notification channels.

Next Steps

• Create custom dashboards to visualize endpoint health, response times, and error rates
• Set up notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email) for your HTTP endpoint alerts
• Learn about the OTel Collector configuration to customize processing and filtering
• Read the HTTP Check Receiver upstream documentation for advanced configuration options like request bodies, custom headers, and response validation