Advanced website monitoring
HTTP headers let the client and the server pass additional information with an HTTP request or response. An HTTP header consists of its case-insensitive name followed by a colon (:), then by its value. Whitespace before the value is ignored.
The most common headers are:
- Accept
- User-Agent
- Authorization
- Content-Type
- Cookie
We go over the user-agent header for your website monitor in this help article.
To add a UA string to your user-agent header for website monitoring on StatusGator, follow the next steps:
1. Click on three dots next to your website monitor to configure it.
2. Switch over to the Settings tab and scroll all the way down.
3. In the HTTP Headers section, input the Header name and value. For example, you can input Accept in the first field and application/json or text/html, which indicates that the client prefers JSON or HTML responses.
The Authorization header is used to send the client’s credentials to the server when the client is attempting to access a protected resource. For example, you can add username to the first field and password to the second field to even further protect your website checking.
The Content-Type header identifies the media type of the content in the request body. For instance, Content-Type: application/json indicates that the request body contains JSON data. This information helps the server successfully interpret and process the payload.
The client can use the Cookie header to send previously stored cookies back to the server. The server then uses these cookies to associate the request with a specific user or session. This header plays an important role in delivering personalized experiences, as it enables the server to remember a user’s login state or language preference.