Explore documentation
  1. Welcome to Uptime 👋
  2. Frequently Asked Questions
  3. Monitoring
    1. Get started with monitoring
    2. Working with monitors
    3. Customizing monitors
    4. Monitor types
  4. On-call scheduling and alerting
    1. Get started with on-call
    2. Sending alerts to Slack ↗
    3. Connecting external calendars
    4. Advanced on-call setup
  5. Incidents
    1. Working with incidents
    2. Create incidents manually
    3. Post mortems
    4. Incident silencing
    5. Incident metadata
  6. Status pages
    1. Get started with status pages
    2. Working with status pages
  7. Integrations
    1. Integrating with Better Stack
  8. Team and account management
    1. Team management
    2. Account settings
    3. Audit logs
    4. Migrating to pay as you go
  9. API
    1. Get started with API
  10. Monitors API
    1. Monitors
    2. Monitor groups
    3. Heartbeats
      1. List all existing heartbeats GET
      2. Get a single heartbeat GET
      3. Get a heartbeat's availability summary GET
      4. Create a heartbeat POST
      5. Update existing heartbeat PATCH
      6. Delete existing heartbeat DELETE
      7. Heartbeats API response params
    4. Heartbeat groups
  11. On-call & Incidents API
    1. On-call calendar
    2. On-call calendar events
    3. Escalation policies
    4. Escalation policy groups
    5. Severities
    6. Severity groups
    7. Incidents
    8. Comments
  12. Integrations API
    1. New Relic Integrations
    2. Datadog Integrations
    3. AWS CloudWatch Integrations
    4. Azure Integrations
    5. Google Monitoring Integrations
    6. Grafana Integrations
    7. Prometheus Integrations
    8. Email integrations
    9. Incoming webhooks
    10. Slack Integrations
    11. Outgoing Webhook integrations
    12. Splunk On-Call integrations
    13. PagerDuty Integrations
  13. Status pages API
    1. Status pages
    2. Status page sections
    3. Status page resources
    4. Status page reports
    5. Status page report updates
  14. Other API
    1. Metadata

Create a heartbeat

Returns either a newly created heartbeat, or validation errors.

POST https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v2/heartbeats

Headers

Authorization
required string

Bearer $TOKEN

Content-type
String

application/json

Body parameters

team_name
string

Required if using global API token to specify the team which should own the resource

name
string

The name of the service for this heartbeat.

period
integer

How often should we expect this heartbeat? In seconds Minimum value: 30 seconds

grace
integer

Heartbeats can fluctuate; specify this value to control what is still acceptable Minimum value: 0 seconds We recommend setting this to approx. 20% of period

call
boolean

Should we call the on-call person?

sms
boolean

Should we send an SMS to the on-call person?

email
boolean

Should we send an email to the on-call person?

push
boolean

Should we send a push notification to the on-call person?

team-wait
integer

How long should we wait before escalating the incident alert to the team? Leave blank to disable escalating to the entire team.

heartbeat_group_id
integer

Set this attribute if you want to add this heartbeat to a heartbeat group

sort_index
integer

An index controlling the position of a heartbeat in the heartbeat group.

paused
boolean

Set to true to pause monitoring — we won't notify you about downtime. Set to false to resume monitoring

maintenance_days
array of strings

An array of maintenance days to set. If a maintenance window is overnight both affected days should be set. Allowed values are ['mon', 'tue', 'wed', 'thu', 'fri', 'sat', 'sun'] or any subset of these days.

maintenance_from
string

Start of the maintenance window each day. We won't check your website during this window. Example: '01:00:00'

maintenance_to
string

End of the maintenance window each day. Example: '03:00:00'

maintenance_timezone
string

The timezone to use for the maintenance window each day. Defaults to UTC. The accepted values can be found in the Rails TimeZone documentation. https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/TimeZone.html

policy_id
integer

Set the escalation policy for the monitor.

201

Returns a newly created heartbeat

Response body

{
  "data": {
    "id": "12345",
    "type": "heartbeat",
    "attributes": {
      "url": "https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v1/heartbeat/abcd1234abcd1234abcd1234",
      "name": "Testing heartbeat",
      "period": 10800,
      "grace": 300,
      "call": false,
      "sms": false,
      "email": true,
      "push": true,
      "team_wait": 180,
      "heartbeat_group_id": null,
      "team_name": "Test team",
      "sort_index": null,
      "paused_at": null,
      "maintenance_days": [
        "mon",
        "tue",
        "wed",
        "thu",
        "fri",
        "sat",
        "sun"
      ],
      "created_at": "2020-05-05T11:41:49.327Z",
      "updated_at": "2020-12-10T15:00:15.089Z"
    }
  }
}
422

Validation failed

Response body

{
  "errors": {
    "name": [
      "Can't be blank."
    ]
  }
}

Example cURL

Example
curl --request POST \
  --url https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v2/heartbeats \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "name": "Testing heartbeat",
    "period": 10800,
    "grace": 300
}'

Previous article

Get a heartbeat's availability summary

Next article

Update existing heartbeat