Understanding Checks

Hoppla draws a clear distinction between monitors and checks. Understanding how they relate is key to getting the most out of the platform.

Monitors vs Checks

A monitor represents a single URL or endpoint you want to watch -- for example, https://example.com. It is the top-level object you create in the dashboard.

Checks are the individual tests that Hoppla runs against that monitor. One monitor can have many checks: uptime, SSL certificate validity, DNS record integrity, and so on. Each check type has its own schedule, its own results history, and its own status.

Think of a monitor as the "what" and checks as the "how." You tell Hoppla what to watch; checks define how it watches.

Check Types

Hoppla supports a wide range of check types. When you add an HTTP monitor, the most relevant ones are created automatically.

Check Type	Description	Default Interval
Uptime	HTTP/HTTPS availability with dual-check verification from two independent probe locations.	1 minute
SSL Certificate	Certificate expiry warning, chain validity, and domain name match.	Daily
DNS Records	Zone-aware change detection across A, AAAA, MX, CNAME, NS, TXT, and CAA records. Reads from the zone's authoritative nameservers, tracks cross-resolver propagation, and alerts on authoritative nameserver changes.	Hourly
Domain Expiry	Domain registration expiry monitoring via RDAP/WHOIS lookup.	Daily
Lighthouse	Google Lighthouse audit covering performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices scores.	On-demand
Broken Links	Full site crawl to discover broken internal and external links.	On-demand
Security Headers	Checks for CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, and more.	Daily
Mixed Content	Detects insecure HTTP resources loaded on HTTPS pages.	Daily
Redirects	Redirect chain analysis and validation, detecting loops and excessive redirects.	Daily
Sitemap	XML sitemap validation, URL count tracking, and structural monitoring.	Daily
Robots.txt	Robots.txt validation, directive parsing, and change detection.	Daily
DNSBL	IP blacklist monitoring across multiple DNS-based blackhole lists.	Daily
Application Health	Custom health endpoint monitoring, expecting a structured JSON response from your application.	1 minute
TCP Port	TCP port availability check with connection time measurement.	1 minute
Ping (ICMP)	ICMP ping for network-level reachability and round-trip time measurement.	1 minute
GEO Audit (AI Readiness)	Static audit scoring a page's readiness for AI/LLM citation across structured data, AI crawlability, content structure, and technical signals.	On-demand

Automatically Created Checks

When you add an HTTP monitor, Hoppla automatically enables the checks that make sense for that URL. For a typical HTTPS website, that includes uptime, SSL certificate, DNS records, mixed content, security headers, redirects, and more.

You are always in control. From the monitor detail page, you can enable or disable any check type individually. You can also adjust check-specific settings, such as the SSL expiry warning threshold or which DNS record types to track.

Check Statuses

Every check result falls into one of three statuses:

• Passing -- Everything looks good. The check completed successfully and all conditions are met.
• Warning -- Something needs attention but is not critical yet. For example, an SSL certificate expiring in 14 days.
• Failing -- A problem was detected that likely affects your users. For example, the site returned a 500 error or the SSL certificate has expired.

Dual-Check Verification

For uptime checks, Hoppla uses dual-check verification to eliminate false positives. When an uptime check fails from one probe location, Hoppla immediately re-runs the check from a second, independent location. An incident is only created if both locations confirm the failure. This means you will not be woken up by a transient network blip between a single probe and your server.

Availability vs Advisory

Hoppla organizes its checks into two categories:

Availability checks directly affect whether your site is considered "up" or "down." These include uptime, SSL certificate, DNS records, application health, TCP port, ICMP ping, and cron/agent heartbeats. When an availability check fails, Hoppla creates an incident, updates your status page, and sends notifications according to your alerting rules.

Advisory checks surface useful information and best-practice recommendations but do not affect your uptime status. These include Lighthouse audits, broken link scans, security header analysis, and sitemap validation. Advisory checks generate warnings that appear in the dashboard, but they will not trigger incident creation or change your reported availability percentage.

This separation ensures your uptime metrics stay meaningful while still giving you visibility into everything that could be improved.