Prober offline

What is a prober?

Probers are the distributed agents that execute monitor checks from different geographic regions. If a prober goes offline, monitors assigned to that region stop producing check results and their status becomes stale.

Symptoms

• Monitors show a "No recent data" or stale status badge.
• The monitor detail page shows check results stopped at a specific time.
• You receive an internal system notification that a prober region is unavailable.

Diagnose the scope

1. Go to Monitors and filter by region (if your Uptime plan includes multi-region monitoring, i.e. any paid Uptime plan: S, M or L).
2. If multiple monitors in the same region are stale, the prober for that region is likely the cause.
3. If only one monitor is affected, the issue is more likely with the monitored endpoint itself or a routing problem (DNS, firewall).

HowlOps runs the probers for you

You don't run or host any prober yourself. HowlOps operates the whole checking fleet across multiple regions, so there is nothing on your side to restart or re-register. Our job is to keep those regions healthy so your services stay watched around the clock.

If monitors across an entire region go stale at once, that points to a platform-side regional issue rather than anything in your setup. Check the HowlOps status page for your account to see whether a regional outage is posted.

If no incident is posted and monitors in multiple cloud regions are affected, contact support and include:

• Affected monitor IDs.
• The approximate time the issue started.
• The X-Request-Id from any failed API calls if available.

Monitor shows "unknown" status

A monitor in "unknown" state has not completed a check cycle since it was created or resumed. Possible causes:

• The prober has not yet picked up the new monitor. Allow up to one full check interval.
• The prober is offline (see above).
• The monitor URL is unreachable from the prober's network (DNS failure, private IP, firewall).

To test reachability: use the Run diagnostic button on the monitor detail page (available on paid Uptime plans).

See also

• Missing notifications
• FAQ - common errors