Spectate sends requests to systems all over the internet, sends alerts by email, SMS and phone, and hosts public status pages. That gives us a responsibility to the owners of those systems, to the people who get our messages and to the people who read status pages. This acceptable use policy sets out the rules. It is part of our Terms of service and applies to every Team, user and integration.

1. Monitor only what you may monitor

Only monitor websites, APIs, servers, ports, DNS records, mail servers and domains that you own or operate, or that you are allowed to monitor by their owner.
Monitoring public websites you do not own at a normal interval, for example to watch a supplier's or a payment provider's status page, is fine, as long as it fits that site's terms and does not burden it.
Do not use checks to test the security of systems, to scan ports or networks, or to find vulnerabilities, unless you have the owner's written permission.
Do not put credentials into a monitor that you are not allowed to use.

2. No load testing, attacks or scraping

Do not use checks, screenshots or webhooks as a load test, stress test or denial-of-service attack, and do not create many monitors for the same target to multiply requests.
Do not use the Service to send requests to private or internal networks, or try to get around our protections against this.
Do not use checks to scrape or collect content or personal data from other websites.
Do not use SMTP, IMAP or POP3 monitors to send email, test open relays, or try to log in to mail servers that are not yours.

3. No abuse of SMS, phone calls and email

Only add phone numbers and email addresses of people who expect alerts from you, such as your team members and on-call people.
Do not use SMS or phone calls to send marketing, to send messages unrelated to alerts, or to generate traffic to premium-rate or other numbers for profit ("SMS pumping" or "toll fraud").
Do not use status page subscriptions or alert channels to send spam. Status page emails are for updates about the services on that page.
Do not add people as status page subscribers without their consent. Subscribers always confirm their email address first.

4. Status pages

Status pages are public, or shared with the people you give access to. You are responsible for what you publish. Status pages and their content must not:

impersonate another company or brand, or look like the status page of a service you do not run;
be used for phishing, fraud or collecting login details or payment data;
contain malware, or link to it;
contain illegal content, such as content that infringes intellectual property rights, incites hatred or violence, or sexually exploits children;
contain personal data of others without a legal basis, for example names of customers who were affected by an incident;
be used mainly for marketing or for content unrelated to the status of a service.

Custom domains must be domains you are allowed to use.

5. Protect the Service and other customers

Do not try to access data of other Teams, or parts of the Service you have no access to.
Do not get around plan limits, rate limits or security measures, for example by creating many trial Teams.
Do not overload the Service, for example with a very large volume of events to an alert source or API, or with requests that are much larger than normal use.
Do not resell or share access to the Service without our written permission.
Report security problems you find under our Responsible disclosure policy. Do not test them in a way this policy does not allow.

6. Follow the law

Use the Service only for lawful purposes and in line with the laws that apply to you, including data protection, telecommunications and anti-spam laws. Do not use the Service for anything that would be illegal if it came from you directly.

7. Reporting abuse

If you think Spectate is used against this policy, for example because our checkers send unwanted traffic to your systems, you received unwanted SMS messages or emails, or a status page contains illegal or misleading content, email abuse@spectate.net.

Please include as much as you can:

what happened, and when (with time zone);
the URL of the status page, or the IP addresses, host names or phone numbers involved;
for unwanted traffic: the user agent or source IP addresses seen in your logs;
for illegal content: why you think it is illegal;
your name and email address, unless you report possible child sexual abuse material, which you may report anonymously.

We confirm receipt, review every report with care and without undue delay, and tell you what we decided. If a report is about content on a status page, we also tell the customer what we did and why, and how they can object, unless the law does not allow this or doing so would help someone commit a crime.

To stop checks to your systems, you can also block our checkers. They send requests with the user agent Spectate/1.0 (+https://docs.spectate.net/faq/uptime-monitor-bot) from these IP addresses: 94.237.7.128 (Europe), 85.9.192.172 (North America), 95.111.197.76 (Asia) and 95.111.223.64 (Oceania).

8. What we do about violations

When we find or receive a report of a violation, we may, depending on how serious it is:

contact you and ask you to fix it;
pause or delete the monitor, channel, status page or content involved;
limit features, such as SMS and phone calls;
suspend the Team or Account;
end the agreement;
report criminal activity, such as phishing, fraud or child sexual abuse material, to the authorities.

We act in proportion to the violation and normally contact you first. For serious violations, such as attacks on others, phishing or SMS fraud, or when the law requires it, we may act right away. If you think we made a mistake, reply to our message or email abuse@spectate.net, and a person will review the decision.

You remain responsible for paying for the Service during a suspension caused by a violation, and you are liable for damage caused by it, as described in the Terms of service.

9. Changes

We may update this policy, as described in our Terms of service. The date at the top shows the latest version.

Questions about this policy? Email help@spectate.net.