Question 1

What is HowlOps?

Accepted Answer

HowlOps is a modern monitoring platform for tracking the availability of your web services, APIs, and infrastructure. We offer HTTP monitoring, SSL certificates, heartbeat monitoring, and status pages with real-time alerting.

Question 2

How long does setup take?

Accepted Answer

Setup takes just minutes. After registering, you can create your first monitor with a single click. Adding notification channels (email, Slack) takes another 2–3 minutes. A full monitoring setup with multiple monitors and heartbeats can be done in under 15 minutes.

Question 3

Can I integrate via API?

Accepted Answer

Yes, we offer a complete REST API for CRUD operations on monitors, heartbeats, status pages, and notification channels. API tokens can be generated in settings with granular permissions (read-only / read-write). Documentation is available at api.howlops.com/api/v1

Question 4

Do you offer an uptime SLA?

Accepted Answer

We do not offer a contractual uptime SLA with service credits on any plan. What we do instead is measure our own availability and publish it: howlops.com/status shows a rolling 90-day uptime percentage for HowlOps itself, computed from our own self-check suite, and a day we did not measure is shown as "no data" rather than painted green. The platform runs across independent EU regions for resilience. If you need contractual terms, talk to us and we will tell you honestly what we can commit to.

Question 5

What pricing plans do you offer?

Accepted Answer

HowlOps uses modular pricing — you pick a plan per capability instead of one bundled tier. Uptime monitoring: Free ($0, 50 monitors), S ($15/mo, 100 monitors), M ($39/mo, 500 monitors), L ($99/mo, 2,000 monitors). On-call & incident management: Free, or Paid ($15/mo) for unlimited schedules, escalations and SMS/voice paging. Status pages: Free (1 page), Starter ($5/mo, unlimited pages), Pro ($9/mo, white-label + custom domains). Mix and match only the plans you need — see /pricing for the full breakdown.

Question 6

Do you have a free tier?

Accepted Answer

Yes — every capability has a permanent free plan, with no time limit and no card required. Free uptime monitoring includes 50 monitors at a 120s check interval, SSL monitoring, 5 heartbeats and email notifications; free on-call covers 1 schedule with basic escalation; free status pages include 1 public page.

Question 7

Do you support SSL monitoring?

Accepted Answer

Yes, SSL monitoring is included with HTTP monitors on every plan, including Free. We automatically track SSL certificate expiration and notify you 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry. Domain (WHOIS) expiry monitoring is also available.

Question 8

What notification channels do you support?

Accepted Answer

Email and in-app/push notifications are available on the free plan. Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, webhooks and PagerDuty work on any paid uptime plan. SMS and voice-call paging are part of the paid On-call plan (25 SMS + 10 voice calls per active responder per month included).

Question 9

How does heartbeat monitoring work?

Accepted Answer

Heartbeat monitoring is used to track cron jobs, scheduled tasks, and background processes. Your system "pings" our platform at regular intervals. If a ping is not received within the expected window, we send an alert. Heartbeat pings are HTTP GET/POST requests.

Question 10

What are the tier limits?

Accepted Answer

Limits are per capability. Uptime: Free 50 monitors / 120s interval / 5 heartbeats / 7-day history; S 100 / 60s / 100 / 30-day; M 500 / 30s / 500 / 90-day; L 2,000 / 15s / 2,000 / 365-day. On-call: Free 1 schedule, 3 responders, 14-day incident history; Paid unlimited schedules and responders, 25 SMS + 10 voice calls per active responder per month, 365-day history. Status pages: Free 1 page; Starter unlimited pages; Pro unlimited + white-label + custom domains.

Question 11

Is there a free trial?

Accepted Answer

There is a permanent free plan for every capability — no credit card required — so you can run HowlOps indefinitely at the free limits. A time-limited trial of the paid features is offered on signup so you can evaluate multi-region checks, screenshots, on-call paging and more.

Question 12

What happens when I cancel?

Accepted Answer

You keep full access until the end of your current billing period. After that the affected capability drops to its free plan — your account stays open and your data is kept. Anything over the free limits (for example monitors beyond 50) is paused rather than deleted, so you can re-enable it by upgrading again.

Question 13

Do you offer annual billing?

Accepted Answer

Yes! Annual plans are available and give you two months free — about 17% off compared to paying monthly. You can switch between monthly and annual billing on the pricing page or in your account settings.

Question 14

What is a monitor check interval?

Accepted Answer

The check interval is how often we probe your endpoint. The free uptime plan checks every 120 seconds; paid plans go faster — 60s on S, 30s on M, and as low as 15s on L. Shorter intervals detect outages sooner.

Question 15

How does multi-region monitoring work?

Accepted Answer

Multi-region checks run on the paid uptime plans (S and above). Your endpoint is probed from independent regions and you are alerted only when an issue is confirmed from more than one region, which cuts false alarms caused by a single bad vantage point.

Question 16

What payment methods do you accept?

Accepted Answer

We accept all major credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express) through Stripe. All payments are processed securely — we never store your card details.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions