Freshping, A Week or 2 in Review

I know i said i’d follow up in a week about freshping, but …. all the lumber for my deck came in so I decided to build that first. On the plus side, by letting freshping run longer we have more to look at now. So it’s kinda a win-win.

Previously, I went through everything that is included in the free edition of freshping, so i don’t need to rehash every detail here.

Now that freshping has been running for 2 weeks when you log in there is actually data there. I know shocker (add sarcasm) But in all seriousness, when you log into you’re brought to the dashboard and it has a high level overview of your sites.

On the dashboard, Freshping provides the high level metrics of web site monitoring. How many sites are up? How many sites are down? Did you pause any of them? Then for each site it shows the previous 24 hours to see how you’re doing at a glance.

Since i haven’t looked at this in 2 weeks, logically my next thought would be to look at the historical reporting to see what has happened day to day. For that we head back to the reports tab.

In the Reports section, when you expand your timeline out further then the statistics and incidents change with it. My 100% uptime goes down to 99.94% because of the “downtime” of doing maintenance on the site. To be fair Freshping did notice it and sent me multiple emails saying it was down and 1 email when everything was back up.

It is a nice feature to be able to add notes on my an incident occurred. These can become very valuable down the line when you’re trying to track an issue over time.

The last part that has information in it now is the Status page option. Granted this would be more useful if i had more then 1 site but none the less, Its better then it was on day 1.

At the top level you get a 7 day running tally of you uptime. You can see the 1 red tick in the line showing when my site was down for maintenance. Then when you click into the site get similar information as the report view, displayed in a quick view format.

All in All, I believe the is a great free tool to monitor websites. Since signing up I have NOT been spammed with ads or emails trying to get me to convert to a paid for license or buy other fresh works products.

My only concern is there integrations are a little limited. Most of the world runs on a Microsoft and there isn’t a direct way outside of using the web hook trigger in PowerAutomate to bring notifications into the Microsoft 365 world (outside of email). If I was at a web development company or e-commerce company i could see the use case of when correlating uptime with active sessions and revenue all within Power Bi.

To be fair it is doable with the current options but it could be better or cleaner. Depending on what you’re trying to do either you have to translate everything from the web hook option in PowerAutomate and then to its final form (PowerAutomate Licensing) or push it to Zapier then to PowerAutomate then to it’s final location (double licensing hit).

If you need Free/Cheap website monitoring Freshping has my vote.

-Terry Sheridan