Pingdom
SolarWinds' uptime and performance monitoring service, checking sites from probe servers worldwide.
Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)Official documentation: documentation.solarwinds.com
What Pingdom does
Pingdom runs uptime and performance checks against URLs its customers configure, from a global network of probe servers. Basic uptime checks are plain HTTP requests; its page-speed tests load the full page in a real Chrome browser, so those do execute JavaScript.
Why it visits your site
A Pingdom customer - most likely you, your host, or your agency - added your URL to a monitor. Checks arrive from many IPs because Pingdom probes from multiple locations.
The bigger picture: utility & developer tools
This category is the honest miscellany of a server log: monitoring services, platform callbacks, and the default user agents of HTTP libraries. The unifying rule is that the string identifies software, not intent. A curl request might be your host's health check or a vulnerability probe; a python-requests hit might be a researcher or a scraper; a WordPress UA is one site talking to another. Reading these names as a threat list misses what they actually are - a census of the scripted web touching your site, most of it mundane, some of it yours.
robots.txt barely applies here, and not out of rudeness: monitors fetch the exact URL a customer configured, feed fetchers act on a user's subscription, and bare libraries simply ship with no robots logic at all. Blocking a default library UA filters the honest and the lazy while the malicious change one line and continue, so the effective levers are different - rate limiting by IP, watching which paths get requested, and reserving blocks for named services you can verify and have decided you don't want.
Should you block it?
Monitors fetch the URL they were pointed at, so robots.txt never enters the picture. Blocking Pingdom while someone is legitimately monitoring your site produces false outage alerts - SolarWinds notes firewall blocks are the most common cause of phantom downtime. Only block it if you've confirmed nobody on your side relies on it.
Block via robots.txt
Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask Pingdom to stay away:
User-agent: Pingdom.com_bot Disallow: /
Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.
How to see Pingdom traffic on your site
You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Pingdom request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because Pingdom doesn't run scripts.
Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Pingdom and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.