Every minute of downtime costs trust, revenue, or both. Use this guide to design a monitoring strategy that catches outages early, distinguishes real failures from local glitches, and routes alerts to people who can act.
A single dashboard of pinned targets gives the team a shared mental model. Trends matter as much as the live state — latency creeping up over weeks is often the earliest signal of an upcoming outage.
Run through these steps in order. Each step links to the right diagnostic tool.
Every 1–5 minutes for production. Lower frequencies miss short outages; faster checks add cost without much benefit for most sites.
An HTTP request that validates status code AND response content. A 200 OK on a broken page is still 'up' to a status-only check.
Yes. Routing or CDN failures can take a region down while the rest of the world sees the site up.
Require 2+ failed checks before alerting, use escalation tiers, and route by severity. A single failed ping shouldn't wake anyone up.
Monitor it continuously
Save this check, get alerts on changes, and track multiple domains in one dashboard.