Frequently asked questions

CheckBeacon monitors the uptime, latency, and correctness of your APIs and web apps. It runs scheduled checks from one or more regions and reports a status — healthy, warning, unhealthy, or error — along with response time and history for each check.

An API (HTTP) check calls an endpoint directly — you configure the method, headers, request body, authentication, expected status codes, response-time thresholds, and body assertions. A UI (browser) check uses real browser automation (Playwright) to drive a multi-step user journey, like loading a page, logging in, clicking through, and asserting that the right content appears — so you're testing what a real user actually sees, not just the API behind it.

Yes. Multi-step checks let you chain requests and pass data between steps using templates like {{step.1.body.token}}. For example, log in to capture an authentication token in step 1, then call a protected endpoint with that token in step 2 — all as part of a single check.

Yes. You can run the same check from multiple regions to catch issues that only affect users in certain parts of the world, such as a regional outage or elevated latency from a specific location.

Each check has an alert_after_consecutive_failures setting. CheckBeacon only sends an alert once a check has failed that many times in a row, so a single transient network hiccup won't trigger a notification — but a real, sustained outage will.

Checks report one of four statuses: healthy (everything passed), warning (a soft threshold was crossed, e.g. response time), unhealthy (the check failed its assertions or status code expectations), or error (the check itself couldn't run, e.g. a connection or timeout error).

Retention depends on your plan — the Free tier keeps 7 days of result history, while paid plans keep results for up to 90 days. All retained results are available in the dashboard and via the API, with pagination and status filtering.

Yes. CheckBeacon ships as a Docker image with a Helm chart for Kubernetes deployments, and supports either SQLite (simple, single-node) or MySQL (for larger deployments) as its database.

When configuring an API check, you can authenticate outbound requests with no auth, HTTP Basic auth, a Bearer token, or a custom API key header — whatever the endpoint you're monitoring requires.

Yes — everything available in the CheckBeacon dashboard (checks, results, groups, stats) is also available over a REST API secured with Bearer token authentication. See the Developers page for the full reference and code samples.

Create an account, then add your first check from the dashboard or via the API. The Getting Started guide walks through creating an account, adding API and UI checks, setting up alerting, choosing regions, and inviting your team.

CheckBeacon is priced in tiers based on the number of monitors, check interval, regions, result retention, and team seats. The Free tier is great for trying things out; the Team tier adds more monitors, faster intervals, multi-region, and UI checks; Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, unlimited monitors, and self-hosting support. See the Pricing page for details.