Zapier recipes

These Zaps use the Pingstack Zapier integration. Connect Zapier first.

Pause checks during maintenance windows

Stop alerts during planned work by pausing checks while a maintenance event is on your calendar.

1. Create a Zap with Google Calendar → Event Start. Choose the calendar and how long before the start to trigger.
2. Add Filter by Zapier: continue only if the event’s summary contains maintenance. Skip this if the calendar holds only maintenance events.
3. Add Pingstack → Pause Check and choose the check. Add one Pause Check step per check.
4. Add Delay by Zapier → Delay Until and map the event’s end time.
5. Add Pingstack → Resume Check for each check you paused.
6. Test the Zap and turn it on.

Resumed checks start again from pending, so a long pause doesn’t look like missed check-ins. An incident that was already open when you paused stays open until the check recovers. Zapier delays can’t exceed one month, so keep maintenance events shorter than that.

Outlook Calendar’s Event Start trigger works the same way.

Monitor business activity with heartbeats

A heartbeat check can watch for something that should keep happening, such as orders, payments or sign-ups. If they stop arriving, the check goes down, even when your website is still up.

1. In Pingstack, create a heartbeat check. Set its interval to the longest gap you’d consider normal, for example one hour for orders during business hours, and add a grace period for quiet spells.
2. Create a Zap triggered by the activity, for example Shopify → New Order, Stripe → New Payment or a form tool’s new-submission trigger.
3. Add Pingstack → Send Ping and choose the heartbeat check. Optionally map a number, such as the order total, to Value and set value thresholds on the check.
4. Test the Zap and turn it on.

Each ping URL accepts up to 60 pings a minute. For busier activity, ping on a schedule from a digest, or add Filter by Zapier so only some events ping. Pick an interval that fits your quietest normal period, or schedule the check with a cron expression that matches your opening hours.

More ideas

• Backups and jobs you can’t edit: send a ping when a new file appears in a Google Drive, Dropbox or Amazon S3 backup folder.
• Incident log: on Incident Resolved, add a Google Sheets or Airtable row with the check name, cause, start and resolution times.
• Follow-up tasks: on Incident Resolved, create a review task in Linear, GitHub Issues, Asana or Trello.
• Updates from chat: when a message in your incident channel starts with update:, use Find Open Incident, then Post Incident Status Update.