API Monitoring
Get alerted when GitHub has issues that could affect your deployments, CI/CD pipelines, and development workflows.
https://api.github.com/zen for general API health
GitHub is critical infrastructure for modern software development. When it goes down, your entire development workflow can stop.
GitHub Actions, webhooks, and integrations stop working during outages. Your deployments, tests, and automation all depend on GitHub being up.
Teams can't push code, review PRs, or merge changes during outages. Knowing about issues early helps you communicate with your team.
Many tools fetch data from GitHub's API—project management, code analysis, deployment platforms. Monitoring helps you understand cascading failures.
https://api.github.com/zen
Lightweight health check endpoint. Returns a random GitHub design philosophy. No authentication required, minimal rate limit impact.
https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs
Check GitHub Actions availability for your repository. Requires authentication. Replace {owner}/{repo} with your repo details.
https://api.github.com/rate_limit
Check your current rate limit status. Useful if you have integrations that make frequent API calls. Requires authentication.
https://www.githubstatus.com/api/v2/status.json
GitHub's official status page API. Check overall status programmatically. No authentication required.
GitHub is not a single service—it's many components. Understanding which ones your workflow depends on helps you prioritize monitoring.
Push, pull, clone, fetch. Core git functionality that developers use constantly.
CI/CD workflows. Outages here stop your automated builds, tests, and deployments.
Event notifications to external services. Critical for integrations with Slack, Jira, deployment tools.
REST and GraphQL APIs. Used by third-party tools, bots, and custom integrations.
Static site hosting. If you host documentation or landing pages here, monitor it separately.
Package registry (npm, Docker, etc.). Critical if you publish or install packages from GitHub.
GitHub has rate limits that affect how frequently you can monitor. Here's what you need to know:
If you're monitoring once per minute (60 checks/hour), you're right at the unauthenticated limit. Use a Personal Access Token to avoid rate limit errors that could look like outages.
Go to app.uptimesignal.io and click "Create Monitor".
Use https://api.github.com/zen for basic monitoring, or a specific endpoint for your workflow.
For authenticated endpoints, add a header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN
1-minute checks catch issues quickly. GitHub issues are usually resolved within 15-30 minutes.
Check githubstatus.com for official status. Your monitoring alert may arrive before their status page updates.
Alert developers that GitHub is having issues. This prevents confusion about why builds are failing or PRs aren't merging.
If your deployment pipeline depends on GitHub, pause it until the outage is resolved. Avoid partial deployments or failed builds.
Developers can continue working with local git. Commits can be pushed once GitHub recovers. Consider having a local git mirror for critical repos.
Your UptimeSignal alert will notify you when GitHub is back. Verify a few operations manually before resuming full workflows.
GitHub's status page is updated manually and can lag behind actual issues. External monitoring catches problems faster and alerts you proactively, rather than requiring you to check their status page.
Monitor https://api.github.com/zen for general API health. It's lightweight, doesn't require authentication, and has minimal rate limit impact.
Monitor https://api.github.com/repos/{owner}/{repo}/actions/runs with authentication. Alternatively, monitor GitHub's status page API for the Actions component.
Unauthenticated requests are limited to 60/hour—exactly one per minute. Use a Personal Access Token (5,000/hour) to avoid rate limit issues that could look like outages.
Check githubstatus.com, notify your team, pause deployments, continue working locally if needed, and monitor for recovery. Have a playbook ready so you're not scrambling during an outage.
Know about GitHub issues before your team notices. Set up in 60 seconds.
Start monitoring free →