Robot.alp review – Monitor your entire website from multiple aspects

Our website is often a crucial part of our business, so the uptime is extremely important. This right here is Robot.ALP, an uptime monitor who can monitor your website on multiple parameters and let you know if something is wrong in real time. Let’s check it out.

So here we are inside Robot.ALP with a very simple overview of our organisations integrations and our billing plan. Before we deep dive into the different organisations where we also have our status pages, I just want to show you integrations because each integration here is there to help you send a message every time a monitor is down or your specific website. So, for instance, you can set up a Telegram, a slack, a Zapier or a discord to send you a message every time there is a monitor failing. They do also have a web hook which is a way for you to always be able to shoot something a specific place when a monitor is failing. The same thing is true with Zapier, because Zapier opens up to so many types of integrations.

1. Features of Robot.alp
2. Robot.alp Pricing
3. Alternatives to Robot.alp
4. Future of Robot.alp
5. Pros & Cons using Robot.alp
6. Last thoughts about Robot.alp

Features of Robot.alp

But let’s move over to the organisations and jump into the first organisation I’ve made here. So, within an organisation we have a dashboard which is a quick overview of your monitors, the time zone, some information is not so relevant. Then we have the team, we have all of our monitors, and then we have our status page. So let’s start with the uptime monitors here and then build a simple uptime monitor. Let’s call this one website, and then we’ll just enter a website here.

We’ll disable the authorization and then tell it to check every 2 minutes. Now you can see that we can set up a notification here, and we can either get an email or if you have set up the different integrations, we can also enable them here. If you’re within the United States or Canada, you can also use the SMS service. For now, I’ll use the email and down here you choose the period of the notification. The location is where we decided to test from. So right now it’s testing from the United States on the East Coast.

We can also change that to somewhere in between Europe. Let’s choose Frankfurt here and then let’s save this monitor. So now it will test every 2 minutes whether the website is up and this is the first monitor. You can also monitor a specific port. You can use an API monitor and this is a way for you.

Let’s say that you have an API that has specific endpoints and these endpoints need to return something specific for you to know that the endpoint is working. Then you can set up a monitor for the API and then say let’s call this one API. We’ll call this one again just the same website for now, and then you can see down here, this is the parameters it needs to look for. So, whenever one of these parameters is met, you will then get a notification, and again you can set up authorization and the interval of how often it should be tried. And in the notifications again, you can see that we can set up the different types of notifications that we want to receive.

Now they also have some very creative ones. For instance, the SSL monitor. I really like this one. Often you see that people are using Let’s encrypt for their SSL because it’s free, but sometimes they forget to enable the auto update and then the website will basically be unreachable. So, in case of this and in order to avoid this, you can set up an SSL monitor.

So let’s call this one SSL certificate, and then I’ve entered the website again and then here you can see that. How long should I wait for a response? Let’s set the time-out for 6 seconds. And how many days before the SSL expires do you want to be notified? Let’s say five days.

And then here you can see that it checks every 6 hours. That is maybe a little too much. Let’s set it to just one time a day and then let’s press save. So now we are sure that every time our SSL certificate expires, or it’s closed too, we will get a notification that we have to renew it. Of course if you have auto update enabled you don’t need this, but you can still add it as an extra security layer for yourself.

Then they also have keyword monitors and this is where it will look for a specific keyword on a website, and then you can get notified if it exists or if it doesn’t exist. And this is from a UI perspective in order to see whether the website is rendering correct and the correct keywords are showing. Furthermore, then they have a DNS monitor, they have a safe browsing monitor which is a little the same as an SSL certificate. But here it is just really checking whether the SSL certificate has been enabled correct or there are some pages maybe where it’s not enabled. The last one I really like and that’s a page speed monitor.

Here you can set up that you want to check that your website is always the same or above a specific score, and you can see that we have a performance score and some other different scores down here. For instance, an SEO score and this is combined with a Google page speed report. So you can see that I’ve already set up one here, and it gave me an error because I was not achieving the results. So you can see that this is directly from Google’s page speed. And here we have the performance, accessibility, best practises, SEO and progressive web apps.

As this website is not a progressive web app it is not showing this one and that’s basically just unavailable. But for the other ones it is showing that I’m using the best practises. My accessibility is good, but I need to work on my SEO and my performance and by scrolling down we can see what it is I need to work on. I need to reduce the unused CSS and the initial server response, and then we can see down here we have a log so every time it runs this page speed report it will then be locked down here, so we can see it and the location it has done from. I really like this special monitor, It is so creative, and I would like to see more of this thinking.

Now when you have set up all of your monitors it’s time to build your status page. In here we have some custom options that we can choose, but it is pretty locked so let’s go through it. Let’s set up a title and write a subdomain and the other elements here. I have filled out the information, and I’m just using the subdomain from Robot.ALP. You can also down here enter your own subdomain, and then you can see that you need to set up a CNAME with the host of whatever your subdomain is, and the target is the status page robotlp.com. So it’s very easy.

I will remove this for now. Here we choose what monitors we want to use and, as you can see right now, even though I have made multiple monitors, I can only choose the one for my website at the moment and here we can say whether it should be with status history, current status only or with the response time. For now, just with status history. And the last step for your status page is basically the design. You can upload a logo for light mode, dark mode and a favicon, and then you can choose how your design should be, so you can see it is basically the same.

The only thing is that on the right side here we can choose a header colour so let’s go ahead and choose a purple ish blue colour. In appearance, you can decide whether it should be automatic or whether it should always be in light or dark mode. I would choose automatic and then press save. So now our status page is ready. So let’s go and see how it looks.

So the first thing I noticed is the font up here seems not working 100%, but except for that, it looks excellent. It says it’s powered by Robot.ALP. I would like to be able to remove that but other than that, I can get in touch here, and I can see the website monitor. One thing I’m noticing is that it is showing me for the last 90 days but this monitor we just made together in this review, so it shouldn’t show the last 90 days if you’re asking me, but it is showing it, and it’s showing 100% uptime, so everything looks good and here you can see that this one we can basically take and then use including with our website. So you can have a status menu point on your footer or in your header depending on how you want to do it.

Then you can link to this status page, and you can even use your own custom subdomain in order to really keep it within your environment. But that is the functionality within Robot.ALP. It is very simplified, but with the integrations, the notifications and the status page combined with the creative monitors, I think we are very intrigued to see what will happen in the future, which we will discuss just in a moment.

Robot.alp Pricing

Now let’s discuss pricing. They don’t have a free plan, but they do have a 14-day free trial where you can test it out and based on those 14 days, then you will know whether you want to upgrade to a paid plan and keep using Robot.ALP. And when you compare all the four plans to each other, you can see that they don’t differ on the amount of features, they differ on the limits. So, just start low, and then you can always upgrade over time when your business grows.

Alternatives to Robot.alp

Now the first alternative to Robot.ALP is UptimeRobot.

They have been in the industry longer, so they have had more time to develop more features, more integrations and more custom options for your status page. And then we, of course, also have the product from Atlassian. Now the other alternative is Better Uptime. Not only do they have a very modern design, they also have custom options for your status page and so many options that you can dive into in order to make the status page aligned with your website and tracking exactly what it is that you’re looking for.

Future of Robot.alp

Now let’s take a look at the future of Robot.ALP. The first thing I noticed immediately is that they’re working on two new apps, one for iOS and one for Android. And for me, the most obvious thing is, of course, to be able to get a notification whenever a monitor is failing. However, I do hope that they will take it to the next level, so we can either see our monitors on the app or at least manage them to some extent. Furthermore, then they’re adding new integrations to PagerDuty and Pushover and this is again mainly for push notifications.

So whether you’re using one of these two tools, you will always know if your website or a monitor is down. Last but not least, then they’re working on a more agile status page because as you’ve seen in the walk through, it’s not possible to customise it that much. You can change the header colour set in a logo, and then you can choose between two different design styles. If we can get more custom options to maybe drag around, add some new sections or just do more with the status page, we will just get so many more options in order to customise it to look into our design style.

Pros & Cons using Robot.alp

Now, after using Robot.ALP people sometimes I really like how creative they have been with all of their monitors. For instance, the page speed, the fact that I can on a weekly basis check my page speed score and then the ports as well. Furthermore, the slack integration and the Zapier integration is just a huge bonus because it opens up an entire world to new integrations, though I wish that they made it possible for me to customise my status page more, and then we could only send text messages to the USA and Canada and then the API monitor should be more versatile, so we can check for a body response and use different types of authorisation.

Last thoughts about Robot.alp

I’m a huge fan of how Robot.ALP has thought outside the boundaries and created some monitors we don’t see every day. I think the monitors combined with the roadmap we will see a fascinating tool in the future, and then I’m really curious to see how they will incorporate their mobile apps. I want to give Robot.ALP three and a half stars. The creative monitors are really doing it for me, but hopefully they will elaborate on their monitors and make the status page more customisable. That’s my review.