Uptime monitoring: finding out before your customers do
The worst way to learn your site is down is a customer call. Monitoring turns a multi-hour outage into a fifteen-minute one.
What to check
A basic check asks whether the homepage loads and what status it returns — not enough, since a site can return 200 while showing an empty page.
Checking for a key fragment in the response is better, and critical flows deserve their own checks: the enquiry form, the payment page, an integration endpoint.
Checks that pay for themselves
SSL certificate and domain expiry dates: both cause a total, entirely predictable outage, and a two-week warning costs nothing.
Server response time, where a rising trend warns of resource exhaustion before the site falls over, and backup size, where a suddenly smaller nightly copy means the backup itself broke.
Alerts without alert fatigue
Telegram is the obvious channel here: everyone responsible sees a work-chat message immediately, unlike an email opened the next morning. Add escalation so an unacknowledged alert moves on.
Require confirmation — two or three consecutive failures from different locations — before declaring an outage. Alerting on every network hiccup trains everyone to ignore the channel.