---
title: "API Endpoint Monitoring — Lemwatch Help"
description: "Monitor your API endpoints for uptime, response time, and expected responses."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/api-endpoint-monitoring"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# API Endpoint Monitoring

> Monitor your API endpoints for uptime, response time, and expected responses.

## API Endpoint Monitoring

 Go beyond homepage uptime checks. LemWatch lets you monitor individual API endpoints — REST, GraphQL, or webhook URLs — with precise assertions.

### Setting Up an API Monitor

- Navigate to Site Details → API Endpoints tab

- Click "Add Endpoint"

- Configure:

- URL — The full endpoint URL (e.g., https://api.example.com/v2/health )

- Method — GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, PATCH

- Expected status code — e.g., 200, 201, 204

- Expected body contains — Optional string that must appear in the response

- Custom headers — Add Authorization, API keys, or custom headers

- Timeout — Max wait time before marking as failed (default: 10s)

### What Gets Monitored

 Metric — Description —

 **Status code** — Whether the response matches your expected code —

 **Response time** — Milliseconds to first byte —

 **Body assertion** — Whether expected content appears in the response —

 **Consecutive failures** — How many checks in a row have failed —

 **Average response time** — Rolling average across all checks —

### Degraded vs Down

 LemWatch distinguishes between **degraded** and **down**:

- Degraded — Endpoint responds but is slower than usual or returns unexpected content

- Down — Endpoint fails to respond, times out, or returns a server error

### Auto-Suggested Endpoints

 When you add a site, LemWatch scans for common API patterns and suggests endpoints:

- /api/health , /api/status

- /wp-json/wp/v2 for WordPress

- /.well-known/ endpoints

- Sitemap and robots.txt URLs

### Alerts

 API endpoint failures trigger the same alert pipeline as uptime checks. Configure per-endpoint thresholds in **Settings → Alerts**.

### Best Practices

- Monitor your critical user flows — login, checkout, search

- Set realistic timeouts — API endpoints behind auth may be slower

- Use body assertions to catch cases where a 200 response contains an error message

- Monitor staging and production separately to catch deployment regressions


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [How do I monitor a JSON API endpoint?](https://lemwatch.com/help/monitor-json-api-endpoint)
- [How does API endpoint degradation alerting work?](https://lemwatch.com/help/api-endpoint-degradation)
- [Uptime Monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/help/uptime-monitoring)
- [Setting Up Alerts](https://lemwatch.com/help/alert-setup)
- [Fleet Health Overview](https://lemwatch.com/help/fleet-health)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [API Endpoints Reference](https://lemwatch.com/help/api-endpoints)