Migrating Your Monitors from Better Stack in 60 Seconds
Vantaj imports your Better Stack monitors AND heartbeats - HTTP, status, keyword, ping, TCP, SMTP, and cron heartbeats with grace periods - with one API token. Here's how it works and what carries over.
Better Stack is a bundle: uptime monitoring, log management, and incident management sold as one platform. That's great if you need all three. If you only need uptime monitoring, you're paying bundle prices for one product - and the on-call schedules, incident workflows, and log pipelines you're not using don't make your checks any faster.
Getting out has the usual problem: no export button, just an API. Vantaj solves it with a direct importer that brings over your monitors and your heartbeats - the part most migrations quietly skip - with a single API token, in about a minute. The flow:
- Copy your team's Uptime API token from Better Stack (Uptime → API tokens)
- Paste it into Vantaj under Settings → Import Monitors → Quick import from Better Stack
- Review the fetched monitors and heartbeats - everything importable is pre-selected
- Click Import and monitoring starts immediately
Step 1: Get your Uptime API token (20 seconds)
In Better Stack, open Uptime → API tokens and copy your team's Uptime API token.
The import only reads your monitor and heartbeat lists - nothing in your Better Stack account is changed or deleted, so you can keep it running in parallel as long as you like.
Step 2: Paste it into Vantaj (10 seconds)
In Vantaj, go to Settings → Import Monitors and choose Quick import from Better Stack. Paste the token and click Fetch monitors.
Vantaj calls the Better Stack API on your behalf and shows every monitor and heartbeat it found. The token is used for that one fetch and never stored.
Step 3: Review and import (30 seconds)
Every importable monitor is pre-selected. The preview shows what each one becomes:
| Better Stack | Becomes in Vantaj |
|---|---|
| HTTP / status monitor | HTTP(s) monitor, with the expected status code |
| Keyword monitor | HTTP(s) monitor with response must contain |
| Keyword-absence monitor | HTTP(s) monitor with response must not contain |
| Ping monitor | Ping (ICMP) monitor |
| TCP monitor | Port (TCP) monitor, with the port |
| SMTP monitor | SMTP monitor |
| Heartbeat | Heartbeat, with period and grace period |
The details come over too:
- Check frequency is snapped to the nearest Vantaj interval, respecting your plan's minimum.
- Paused monitors stay paused.
- Heartbeat timing survives intact. Both the expected period and the grace period import, so a "daily backup with 30 minutes of slack" heartbeat behaves identically in Vantaj.
- Duplicates are caught. Anything already monitored in Vantaj is flagged and deselected, so re-running the import never creates copies.
Click Import, and checks start immediately from multiple regions.
One follow-up for heartbeat users
Imported heartbeats get a new Vantaj ping URL. Your cron jobs, CI pipelines, and backup scripts are still pinging Better Stack until you update them. Swap the URL in your crontab or CI config, and run both providers in parallel for a day so there's no gap in dead-man's-switch coverage while you confirm every job checked in.
What doesn't migrate
Honesty section:
UDP, DNS, POP, and IMAP monitors. Vantaj doesn't have direct equivalents for these types, so they're skipped.
Playwright transaction checks. Scripted browser journeys don't map to uptime monitors. Rebuild the ones that matter as targeted HTTP checks against the endpoints they exercise.
On-call schedules and incident workflows. These belong to Better Stack's incident-management product, not monitor configuration. In Vantaj, alerting is deliberately simpler: set up channels once - Slack, PagerDuty, Telegram, webhooks, email - under Alerts & Notifications, and they apply to every monitor.
Historical uptime data. Your Vantaj graphs start at import time. Run both tools in parallel through the transition if you want overlapping coverage.
Why we built this
Nobody in the uptime monitoring space offers a real self-serve importer, and heartbeats in particular almost never survive a migration - which keeps a lot of teams locked in by their cron jobs. We think switching tools should take a minute, not an afternoon. The importer only reads your data and leaves your Better Stack account intact, because the same courtesy should apply in both directions.
Coming from somewhere else? We also import from UptimeRobot, Pingdom, and StatusCake - and anything that can produce a spreadsheet via CSV bulk import.
Ready to try it? Create a free Vantaj account - 20 monitors free, no credit card - and see the full import guide in the docs.