Regular pings on website – am I missing something?

Off-topic
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Today in the morning I checked the analytics of one of my websites through Plausible and noticed something odd.

Traffic usually peaks during US and EU day time, but throughout last night I got very regular visits from the same unique user – every 2 hours on the dot. It all started yesterday morning (CET)

Have a look:

CleanShot 2023-10-31 at 12.39.43
CleanShot 2023-10-31 at 12.39.431163×580 37 KB

CleanShot 2023-10-31 at 12.39.39
CleanShot 2023-10-31 at 12.39.391163×580 36.7 KB

I am 100% sure this is a bot/crawler of some sort. The only thing I can’t wrap my head around is why. The traffic source is Google – yet the user agents of Google crawlers are public, so Plausible (the analytics tool I am using) filters them out.

So, has anybody spotted something similar? Any ideas how I can get to the source of this traffic (given, that I am using Plausible and I don’t store IPs)?

Curious to hear your thoughts on this :smiley:

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Can you check NGINX logs to get more info about IP and User Agent?
I am getting such regular traffic often, it is usually external system I use to monitor if all my websites are alive or down. Others come from scrapers trying harmful things, like SQL injection attempts in forms etc. Logs from web server usually tell you more than analytics software.

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There is a German proverb that loosely translates to “Sometimes you can’t see the forest because of all the trees.”

That’s how I feel right now :joy:

Obviously, server logs are the answer.

In this case not really helpful though. It is literally just a request to the domain itself, every 2 hours. Same IP address, user agent, etc.

Well, I guess search is over. Guess I’ll need to exclude that IP address from my analytics somehow…

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:rofl: We are using the same proverb in Czech. Never mind, it happens to all of us. I assume it will disappear. Worse would be if they were constantly trying to break in.

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