Pingdom Bot: Uptime Check Requests, IPs and Blocking
Pingdom probe servers request URLs that Pingdom users monitor. Check types, published probe IP lists, and how to allow or block them.
Pingdom is a website monitoring service from SolarWinds. Its probe servers request the URLs that a Pingdom customer adds to a check, to measure uptime and page speed. It is not a search or AI crawler. If you use Pingdom, allow its probe IP addresses. If you do not use Pingdom and want to stop the checks, block those addresses.
What Pingdom requests are
A Pingdom check runs only on the URLs that a Pingdom user adds. If you do not use Pingdom, the check belongs to another Pingdom account. SolarWinds describes these check types in its analytics help:
| Check | What reaches your site | Shows in JavaScript analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime check | A plain request from a probe server | No |
| Page speed check | A page load in a real Chrome browser, run from AWS | Yes |
| Transaction check | A visit in a real Chrome browser | Yes |
For an uptime check, Pingdom selects about 10 probe servers in the region that the customer picks. These servers test the URL in rotation.
User agent
SolarWinds does not publish a full user-agent string for Pingdom. Its analytics help says that you can filter Pingdom visits by the word pingdom in the user agent, or by requests from amazonaws.com. Bot directories list different full strings, so match the word, not one exact string.
Probe server IP addresses
SolarWinds publishes the probe server IP addresses in these formats:
- IPv4 list: my.pingdom.com/probes/ipv4
- IPv6 list: my.pingdom.com/probes/ipv6
- RSS feed with locations: my.pingdom.com/probes/feed
The Pingdom HTTP API also returns the probe list. If a request has pingdom in the user agent, make sure that its IP address is in one of these lists.
Allow Pingdom
SolarWinds says that a firewall or access control list often causes false outage reports. If you use Pingdom, allow the probe IP addresses in your firewall. You can use the RSS feed in an automated job that updates your firewall rules.
Block Pingdom
The SolarWinds pages cited here do not mention robots.txt, so do not rely on it to stop Pingdom checks. If you did not set up the checks and want to stop them, block them on your server or firewall. Match the probe IP addresses or the word pingdom in the user agent.
A block has no effect on search engines or AI crawlers, because they use other user agents. The checks of the other Pingdom account then fail.