Uptime monitoring services
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Keep your web host honest.
Uptime monitoring requests a website from outside at fixed intervals and alerts by e-mail, SMS or chat when it fails. It needs no setup on fortrabbit and gives a signal independent of the host.
An uptime monitor requests pages and endpoints from one or several places, every minute or so. After failed checks, usually several in a row, it alerts by e-mail, SMS or chat.
Relation to web hosting
Monitors check the domains from outside, so fortrabbit needs no setup. The signal does not depend on the host. fortrabbit publishes its own status page.
Most outages that support sees come from the app, after a change to code or configuration. An uptime check shows that the site is down, the logs and metrics show why. A check on a page that touches the database catches more than one on a static file.
Categories
Pingdom and PagerDuty shaped this category, and today the tools overlap: uptime monitors add status pages, status page services add checks, and observability platforms add uptime checks and on-call rotas. A single focused tool, several small ones, one platform or a self-hosted monitor all work.
What to evaluate
Compare:
- Alert quality, escalation rules, and on-call integrations.
- Check types: HTTP(S), keyword, API, SSL, heartbeat, cron, and port checks.
- Global probe locations and check frequency.
- Incident workflows and public or private status pages.
- Integrations with your existing tooling (Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, webhooks).
- Pricing model and included check volume relative to your budget.
Many tools have a free plan with few monitors and longer intervals.