# Know when it's down, and why

Maple checks your sites, APIs, ports and cron jobs around the clock. When one fails, you get the alert with the reason, and a failed HTTP check opens as a trace of the request inside your app.

## What you can monitor

### http: Websites and APIs

Check the status code, response time, body text, JSON fields or headers. Anything other than a 2xx counts as a failure unless you say otherwise.

### tcp: Databases and other ports

Make sure Postgres, Redis, a message broker or a mail server still accepts connections.

### dns: DNS records

Catch a missing or changed A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT or NS record before your users do.

### /hb/<token>: Cron jobs and workers

Your job pings a URL when it finishes. If the ping doesn't arrive on schedule, Maple alerts you.

### failures_to_down: As often as every 30 seconds

Check every 30 seconds or once an hour, and decide how many failures it takes to alert, from 1 to 10.

### create_uptime_monitor(): Set up by your AI agent

Agents can create and update monitors through Maple's MCP server, for example right after shipping a new endpoint.

## Related

- [Alerting](https://maple.dev/features/alerts.md)
- [Distributed Tracing](https://maple.dev/features/distributed-tracing.md)
- [Service Catalog & Map](https://maple.dev/features/service-catalog.md)
- [API Performance](https://maple.dev/use-cases/api-performance.md)