Uptime monitoring
Uptime monitoring is the automatic surveillance of whether a website, shop or software is reachable and working correctly — with immediate notification in case of an outage.
A monitoring service calls the website at short intervals and checks whether it responds. If it fails or loads too slowly, the team is notified — often before customers notice anything.
Good monitoring checks more than the homepage: also forms, login, checkout, interfaces and certificate expiry. So-called health checks report whether all components of an application are working.
At agroplanta, for example, uptime monitoring and health checks run as part of the CI/CD pipeline with separate staging and production environments.
What to look out for
- Monitor the key pages and functions, not just the homepage.
- Send notifications to people who can actually react.
- Also monitor certificate and domain expiry.
- Document outages and analyse causes.
- Account for maintenance windows in monitoring to avoid false alarms.
Common mistakes
- Outages are only noticed when customers call.
- Alerts go to an inbox nobody reads.
- The homepage works but the contact form has not sent anything for weeks.
Frequently asked questions
That a service may on average be unavailable for only a very small share of time — over a year that is about 8.8 hours.
No. A website can be reachable while the form, shop checkout or login do not work. That is why the key functions should be checked too.