Customizing website monitor User-Agent

Customizing website monitor User-Agent

By default, StatusGator sends monitoring requests using a single User-Agent string, currently based on that of the command-line tool Curl, but subject to change from time to time. Some websites or APIs behave differently—or block requests—based on this header. Customizing the User-Agent ensures your monitors work correctly and simulate the traffic you want.

Why customize the User-Agent?

• Bypass filters or allowlists — Some services only respond to specific User-Agents.
• Simulate devices — Test how your site behaves when accessed from mobile or desktop browsers.
• Avoid bot blocking — Prevent monitoring traffic from being misclassified as automated bots.
• Improve logs — Identify monitoring traffic more easily by assigning it a custom User-Agent.

How to customize the User-Agent

1. Go to the Monitors page.
2. Find your website monitor and click the three-dot menu (⋮) > Configure.
3. Open the Settings tab and scroll to the HTTP headers section.
4. Enter:
   • Name: User-Agent
   • Value: the User-Agent string you want to use (for example, a browser, mobile device, or custom identifier).

To make requests appear as if they are coming from a Samsung Galaxy S22 5G, enter:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 13; SM-S901B) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

5. Click Save.

Other example User-Agent strings

• Google Chrome (Windows 10)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.5845.110 Safari/537.36

• Firefox (macOS)

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 13_4_1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

• Safari (iOS 17)

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

• Microsoft Edge (Windows)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/116.0.5845.110 Safari/537.36 Edg/116.0.1938.62

• Android WebView (Pixel 6)

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 13; Pixel 6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/116.0.5845.110 Mobile Safari/537.36

Best practices

• Use the same User-Agent as your users if you want realistic monitoring results.
• Avoid overly generic values like Mozilla/5.0 which can lead to inaccurate readings.
• If you want to track monitoring traffic in your server logs, set a unique User-Agent string.