Uptime monitoring for websites and APIs

Uptime monitoring lets you check whether an application, website or API is responding correctly. It doesn't require installing a library or changing the application's code. All you need is an address to be checked regularly.

How does availability checking work?

The system periodically sends a request to the given address and checks whether a connection was established and how the request ended.

The checking frequency depends on the selected plan. A shorter interval lets you detect an outage faster, but it also means more frequent requests to the monitored address.

What problems can be detected?

• no response from the server,
• connection or DNS error,
• timeout exceeded,
• server-side errors, including 5xx responses.

It's worth remembering that availability and business correctness are two different things. A page can return a 200 status code and still have a broken form or payment. Uptime monitoring is the first layer of control, while error monitoring shows problems occurring inside the application.

Status change and alert

When the monitored address stops responding correctly, its status changes and information about the problem appears. Once the application returns to normal operation, you can also see the moment availability was restored.

Uptime monitoring and error monitoring

It's worth using both mechanisms together. Uptime monitoring answers the question “is the application responding?”, while error monitoring helps answer the question “what is happening inside the application?”.

Combining both sources of information makes diagnosing production problems much easier.

SSL certificate monitoring

The SSL certificate is checked independently of uptime monitoring. This means you can be notified about an approaching expiry date before it becomes a cause of access problems for your site.