We're excited to announce a new feature that gives you more control and flexibility over your outbound probes for monitoring a website or API endpoint. Now, you can specify an "Expected Status Code" and even a value for the HTTP Location header, giving you the ability to assert both the HTTP response status and the Location header exactly.
Expected Status Code
You can now add an "Expected Status Code" to your outbound probe configuration. This means you can define what HTTP response status code would be considered successful for your specific use case. For instance, if you expect a 301 Moved Permanently response, simply specify 301 as your Expected Status Code. This feature empowers you to define success according to your unique needs, such as making sure your www subdomain redirects to your root domain (or vice versa), or that your insecure non-HTTPS URLs redirect to your HTTPS address.
Expected Status Code and Location Header
In addition to specifying the Expected Status Code, you can also assert the value of the HTTP Location header in your outbound probes. This is particularly useful when you're working with redirects (3xx). For example, if you want to ensure that the HTTP response status is 301 and the Location header exactly matches https://example.com/redirect, you can specify 301 https://example.com/redirect as your Expected Status Code. This feature adds an extra layer of precision to your probes, giving you more confidence in the availability of your services.
Default Behavior
Don't worry if you don't specify an Expected Status Code: the default behavior remains the same as before. By default, we’ll still consider only 200 OK and 204 No Content as successful status codes. We've just given you more tools to customize your experience.
We hope this new feature will provide you with even more value from Heii On-Call. As always, we're committed to making Heii On-Call the best possible tool for your on-call scheduling, alerting, cron job monitoring, and website/API monitoring needs.
This feature for monitoring redirects was requested by Heii On-Call users. If you have other vital feature requests, please send us an email at heii@heiioncall.com. Keep checking back for more updates. We're always working on new ways to improve Heii On-Call. Happy monitoring!