Global uptime monitoring with Checkmate and Globalping

Today, we're happy to share that the Checkmate team has integrated Globalping into their tool for global uptime checks.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about the integration, how it improves your uptime monitoring, and how you can use it to run uptime checks across six global regions.

This integration was built by the Checkmate dev team, not by the Globalping team. We love seeing developers integrate Globalping into their tools and want to highlight it.

Why monitor with Checkmate and Globalping

If you’re new to either of these tools, here’s a quick introduction to both:

• Checkmate is an open-source, self-hosted monitoring tool that lets you track server hardware, uptime, response times, and incidents. It provides user-friendly graphs, status pages, and real-time alerts.
• Globalping is an open-source network measurement platform that relies on a community-hosted network of probes to run tests such as ping, HTTP, mtr, and DNS lookups from virtually any location worldwide.

If you’ve been using Checkmate or a similar tool before, you know that monitoring is usually limited to the location where your tool is running. That works well enough for basic uptime checks, but it doesn't tell you much about how your service performs for users in other parts of the world. A server might be perfectly reachable from your home network while being slow or unreachable in Asia or South America.

By integrating Globalping, Checkmate can now run checks from six global regions: Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

This gives you:

• a more realistic picture of your website's or API's global availability. You can catch regional outages or latency issues that a single-location monitor would miss entirely.
• the flexibility to run Globalping checks alongside your existing Checkmate monitors, without having to choose between the two.

How to monitor with Globalping in Checkmate

You can run ping or HTTP tests to your website, service, or API. Other test types in Checkmate are not supported by the Globalping integration.

Let’s walk you through setting up a monitor. If you don't have Checkmate running yet, follow the quickstart guide to get it up and running first.

• In Checkmate, navigate to Uptime and click “Create monitor”
• Pick “ping” as the test type
• Enter the host, test frequency, and other options as you see fit
  • Note that this test frequency refers to Checkmate’s own tests, not Globalping
• To enable Globalping checks, toggle “Geo-Distributed Checks”. This reveals additional configuration options:
  • Locations: let’s select “Europe”
  • Check interval: for testing purposes, let’s keep this at 5 minutes, which is the minimum for running Globalping checks

After saving your monitor, wait a little while to let a few tests come in. Checkmate will run a test at the configured frequency – in our case, every minute. Every 5 minutes, it will use Globalping to run a ping test from Europe.

The location is picked by Globalping at random, so you may see results from any country or city within the selected region. You can see where each test was performed in the results table and on the map below it.

Globalping free tests per hour

At the moment, Globalping provides 250 free tests per hour per IP address, which is plenty for most setups. In the example above, we’re running one test every five minutes, which uses up 12 free tests per hour. Selecting two regions at the same interval doubles that to 24, still well within the limit.

If you do run out, Checkmate will continue running its own tests as usual and resume Globalping checks once your hourly allowance resets.

Example configurations

Finally, let’s look at two more configuration examples.

Run HTTP tests

To run HTTP tests, configure the monitor as usual in Checkmate and toggle the “Geo-Distributed Checks” switch to enable Globalping. As with ping, you can then pick the locations to test from and set the check interval.

Monitor from all regions

You can also select a couple or all six regions at once. In this example, we created a ping monitor with Globalping enabled across all six regions.

Checkmate now runs 6 Globalping tests every 5 minutes, for a total of 72 tests per hour, which still fits comfortably within the free test allowance.

Conclusion

If you're looking to go beyond single-location monitoring, the Checkmate and Globalping integration is a straightforward way to get there. The integration is completely optional, and you can still monitor using only Checkmate's own tests from the tool's location.

(We're excited to see the Checkmate team bring Globalping into their tool, and we hope it gives you a reason to check it out or revisit it if you've tried it before. Head to GitHub or checkmate.so to get started.