Filter Uptime.com Traffic from Analytics or Database

Uptime.com sends server requests to your website as part of the monitoring that we do. These requests can trigger your Google Analytics script and may cause traffic from Uptime.com to appear as though it is an authentic user, inflating traffic numbers or otherwise obscuring traffic statistics. To avoid this issue, you can take one of these steps to filter traffic from Uptime.com monitors without affecting the checks themselves. 

Table of Contents

• Filtering Uptime.com Traffic At A Glance
• Method One: Filter Bots or User-Agents From Google Analytics
• Method Two: Use a Custom Dimension
• Method Three: Filter by Probe Server IP
• Method Four: Filter by User in Your Database

Filtering Uptime.com Traffic At A Glance

• Filter bots and user-agents in Google Analytics to keep your data clean.

• Add your Probe Server IP to Google analytics to accurately track site traffic.

• Run a scheduled filter on your database to remove user-agent specific data.

The Uptime.com User-Agent

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Uptime.com Transaction Checks utilize the following user agents: 

User Agent for Desktop Sites

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Uptime/1.0 (https://uptime.com)

User Agent for Mobile Sites

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Uptime/1.0 (https://uptime.com)

User-Agent for All Other Checks

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Uptime/1.0; http://uptime.com)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Uptime/1.0; http://uptime.com) 

A Transaction Check can purchase items the same way a user can, so this data will expand over time, causing some issues with reporting. For example, it could create an “out of stock” warning or create data suggesting conversions were higher than they are. 

Method One: Filter Bots or User-Agent From Google Analytics

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The first method is the simplest, and the Uptime.com preferred method. Simply filter all bot traffic from Google Analytics. From your Google Analytics admin, navigate to your Settings and scroll down to tick the box for Bot Filtering. This method will filter all traffic Google perceives as a bot. 

Method Two: Use a Custom Dimension

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If you cannot enable this setting, this secondary method will use Custom Dimensions to filter our user-agent from your traffic. Visit your admin and navigate to your Property page, where you will define Custom Dimensions. Name your Custom Dimension “User Agent” and set the scope to Session. You will need to configure your existing gtag.js snippet, which you will need to place wherever you include Analytics. Your Analytics code will look similar to this example:

<!-- Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA_TRACKING_ID"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());
  gtag('config', 'UA_TRACKING_ID', {
      'custom_map': {'dimension1': 'user_agent'}
  });
  gtag('event', 'send_user_agent', {'user_agent': window.navigator.userAgent});
</script>

Google Analytics support documents offer more information on Custom Dimensions: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6186991?hl=en 

To filter this view, visit your Google Analytics Admin and click View > Filters. Next, click Add Filter and set the Filter Type to Custom and the Filter Field to User Agent. 

Method Three: Filter by Probe Server IP

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For this method, you need to access the list of Uptime.com probe servers (Probe Servers > Public Probe Servers).  Use Download CSV to acquire a list of all of the IP addresses, then visit your Google Analytics Account. Google has detailed instructions on adding a filter to Google Analytics. Add a Predefined filter that Excludes by IP Address or by the word "uptime".

Use the IP addresses from the CSV you downloaded from Uptime.com to fill in these values. Google suggests using more than one filter to exclude multiple IP addresses. You can exclude each probe server if you are using monitoring from around the globe. Otherwise, only exclude the servers that correspond with locations you are actively monitoring. 

Method Four: Filter by User in Your Database

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This method uses a schedule to delete any data this user agent generates. (NOTE: we recommend storing the user agent ID and using this as a filter where possible). 

Simply create a job that deletes all data the Uptime.com user creates, and schedule it to run once per day.