What Pingdom does
Pingdom probe servers check the availability of websites and servers monitored through the Pingdom service. SolarWinds publishes the probes' IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in plain text files, as an RSS feed that can be parsed by location and deployed to firewalls, and through an HTTP API for use in scripts, so administrators can allowlist them. Firewall or access control blocking of the probes is a common cause of false outage reports, and Pingdom webhooks are sent from webhook.pingdom.com.
How to identify Pingdom
Temso identifies Pingdomtraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
pingbot|Pingdom\.com_bot|PingdomPageSpeed|PingdomTMSPingdom FAQ
What is Pingdom?
Pingdom is a SolarWinds monitoring service whose probe servers check the availability of websites and servers that customers have set up for monitoring. Its probe IP addresses are published in plain text, RSS, and API formats so administrators can allowlist them.
Can I block Pingdom with robots.txt?
The Pingdom documentation does not describe robots.txt support; the probes are availability checkers that request URLs configured by the site's own operators, not content crawlers. Blocking is done at the network level using the published IPv4 and IPv6 probe address lists, though the documentation notes that blocking probes for a monitored site is a common cause of false outage reports.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
