SteadyStack provides specialized surveillance engine protocols designed to pinpoint infrastructure regressions before customers notice.
Supported Monitor Types
1. HTTP / HTTPS
Executes full HTTP requests with custom headers, query params, HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, PATCH), and JSON/string request bodies. Validates status code ranges and response payload strings.
2. PING / ICMP
Executes low-level ICMP network echo checks to measure raw network transmission round-trip time (RTT) and packet loss percentage.
3. PORT / TCP Socket
Opens direct TCP socket handshakes to arbitrary network ports (e.g., PostgreSQL :5432, Redis :6379, SSH :22) to ensure network daemon availability.
4. SSL Cryptographic Sentinel
Monitors TLS/SSL certificate chains, cryptographic cipher suites, issuer authenticity, and alerts before certificate expiration (e.g., 30, 14, or 7 days prior).
5. DNS Sentinel
Queries authoritative nameservers for A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, and TXT records to detect unauthorized DNS spoofing or accidental propagation errors.
6. HEARTBEAT (Cron Job Watchdog)
Passive incoming webhook watcher. Your internal background worker or cron script pings a unique SteadyStack heartbeat URL upon task completion. If no ping is received within the expected window, an incident triggers.
7. GRPC (gRPC Health Protocol)
Issues a real gRPC request against the standard grpc.health.v1.Health/Check RPC (HTTP/2 preface, HEADERS, and protobuf-encoded HealthCheckResponse). Reports UP only when the service answers SERVING; NOT_SERVING and non-zero grpc-status codes map to DOWN with the specific code surfaced.
8. SMTP (Mail Submission)
Performs the SMTP handshake: validates the 220 service banner, issues EHLO, and optionally completes an AUTH LOGIN exchange with configured credentials (235 accepted). Supports smtp://host:587 (STARTTLS-capable) and smtps://host:465 (implicit TLS).
9. FTP / SFTP (File Transfer)
FTP monitors verify the 220 greeting and that the server accepts the USER command (331 need-password or 230 logged-in). sftp:// targets verify the SSH version banner on port 22.
10. ICMP (True Ping)
Real ICMP echo requests measuring raw round-trip time and packet loss. Runs genuine ICMP via the system ping binary on Node-based private probes; on edge runtimes (where raw sockets are unavailable) it falls back to a TCP connect probe and tags the result as a TCP fallback.
11. IMAP / POP3 (Mail Retrieval)
Connects to IMAP (imap:// / imaps:// on 143/993) or POP3 (pop3:// / pop3s:// on 110/995), validates the greeting banner and capability response, and optionally performs a real LOGIN to verify mailbox credentials.
Quorum Edge Region Targeting
Configure each monitor to run across sovereign edge clusters:
wnam: North America West (San Jose / Portland)enam: North America East (Ashburn / New York)weur: Western Europe (Frankfurt / Amsterdam)eeur: Eastern Europe (Warsaw)apac: Asia-Pacific (Singapore / Tokyo)sentinel-hetzner: Independent Out-of-Band Verification Node (Nuremberg, Germany)