About
PingZen is external monitoring for websites, APIs and servers. It checks your service from the outside, the way a user reaches it, and tells you about a failure before your users do.
What “external” means
An agent on the server sees load, memory and disk. It does not see an expired certificate, broken DNS, a dead load balancer or a block at one provider. Only a request from outside catches those. External monitoring does not replace Zabbix or Prometheus; it covers their blind spot.
More on this in “External website monitoring: what it is and how to choose a service”.
What it checks
23 protocols: HTTP/HTTPS, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, ICMP ping, gRPC, DNS, WHOIS, TLS/SSL certificates, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, FTP/FTPS, DNSBL, PageSpeed, SOCKS5, MTProxy, RTSP cameras, API checks and multi-step transactions in a real browser.
What each check actually catches is on the features page.
Where it checks from
Its own checkers in Moscow (Selectel), Novosibirsk and Minsk. A monitor can use several of them at once to tell a full outage from a regional one; on the free plan a monitor uses one.
For a region we do not cover, or for a local network, you can run your own checker on your own machine.
How you hear about a failure
Telegram, Discord, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, email, webhook and web push. An incident opens after the failure is confirmed, not on the first failed check, so a single network glitch does not wake you up at night. The alert goes out right after that.
Also in the service
- Public status pages — show your users how your services are doing
- Heartbeat monitoring — for cron jobs, backups and servers behind NAT
- REST API and outgoing webhooks
- MCP server — manage monitoring from Claude Code, Cursor and other AI agents
- SLA reports for the last 24 hours, 7 or 30 days
What it costs
Free: up to 55 monitors, a 1-minute interval, all 23 protocols, commercial use allowed. No card needed. Details are on the pricing page.