What is Uptime Monitoring?

Uptime Monitoring is any service that checks a site or service to see if it's responding and able to serve users. If the check fails, that means your site or service is down or not responding and something needs to be done. Certain services, like Nine9s, can also check for slowness or valid SSL/TLS certificates.

💡 Think of Uptime Monitoring as the automated process of having an intern constantly refreshing a page on your site to see if it's still up.

Typically, an Uptime Monitoring service will send you some form of alert when your site or service goes down or becomes unresponsive. These alerts can be text messages, push notifications, emails, or even phone calls.

Without an Uptime Monitoring service, it's difficult to guarantee that your site is available and responsive for your users. It doesn't look good if your customers are the first ones to spot an outage or issue. Uptime Monitoring let's you know before your customers do, which can help you respond to issues quickly and hopefully, no one will ever know there was an issue to begin with.

How Uptime Monitoring Works

At it's most basic level, Uptime Monitoring really is just like an intern refreshing the page, albiet more dependably. Uptime Monitoring service make a request to your site or service periodically and check whether the server returns a response. Some go further and ensure that the response has a successful HTTP status code, that the SSL/TLS cert is valid, and that the response was returned within a given responsiveness window.

Typically, Uptime Monitoring services don't attempt to render the page they requested, so no further resources like images or Javascript are requested.