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DrumbeatsUptimeBot

If you found this page in your server logs, a request from Drumbeats reached you. This page explains what it was, why, and how to make it stop.

What it does

DrumbeatsUptimeBot powers our public is it down? pages. For each listed service it requests one fixed URL every five minutes from our infrastructure in Europe. When that request fails we re-check once from US East and once more from Europe 30 seconds later, then stop: a service that is having a bad day never sees more than three requests from us in a five-minute window, and while an outage is ongoing we drop back to a single request per five minutes.

  • It requests a single, published URL per service (the exact URL is printed on every page).
  • It never crawls, follows links, indexes content or stores response bodies.
  • It uses HEAD where the endpoint supports it, GET otherwise, and reads at most a few kilobytes.
  • It carries no credentials. A well-formed 401 from an authenticated API is treated as proof of life.
  • A 429 with Retry-After drops the service to one request every 30 minutes until it clears.

How to identify it

The public prober sends this User-Agent:

DrumbeatsUptimeBot/1.0 (+https://drumbeats.io/bot)

Uptime monitors that our customers configure for their own sites use a different User-Agent, so the two are easy to tell apart:

Drumbeats/1.0 (+https://drumbeats.io/docs/monitor-types/uptime)

How to opt out

Add a group for our bot to your robots.txt. We re-read it at least once a day and stop within 24 hours:

User-agent: DrumbeatsUptimeBot
Disallow: /

We honour rules addressed to DrumbeatsUptimeBot specifically. Because a liveness check fetches one URL and indexes nothing, we do not apply the generic User-agent: * rules that are written for crawlers (most API hosts disallow everything for crawlers, which would say nothing about whether they mind a status check).

Prefer email? Write to support@drumbeats.io with the hostname. We remove the service and take its page down within 48 hours, no questions asked.

What the pages claim, and what they do not

We never state that a service is down on the strength of a single failed request, a single region, or a blocked response (a bot challenge, a WAF, a rate limit). Failures are confirmed from two regions before they are reported, and blocked responses are recorded as exactly that: a fact about our probe, not about you. Every page states which URL was measured and whether that covers the product, its control plane, or only its public edge. Drumbeats is not affiliated with any of the services it checks.