Generally speaking, should the monitor templates be used as production monitors or should they be customized prior to use.

HTTP and TCP monitors without customization only verify transport-layer connectivity, not that the application is returning correct or expected content.

Customization is not merely a preference - omitting a receive rule can cause false-positive health checks where a broken application continues to receive traffic.

The HTTPS monitor template by default only confirms a TCP handshake and an SSL negotiation, which does not verify that the application is serving valid content. Customizing the receive string causes the monitor to match a specific pattern in the HTTP response body, confirming the application is genuinely functional. Without this customization, a server returning error pages can still pass health checks and receive production traffic.

Monitors such as HTTPS require receive rule customization to be production-ready, while the premise that monitors like FTP must be customized but others need not is an inaccurate generalization.