Uptime Checklist

Website Downtime Monitoring Checklist

Most downtime-monitoring gaps are invisible until an incident reveals them. This checklist walks through the coverage you should be able to confirm in writing — before the next outage forces the question.

Website Downtime Monitoring Checklist — Operational Coverage Audit · A practical checklist for closing gaps in your website downtime monitoring: probes, intervals, regions, alert routing, and continuity into incident workflows. · /website-downtime-monitoring-checklist

Coverage

  • Every public-facing hostname is monitored, including www / apex variants.
  • Login, checkout, and other revenue paths have synthetic checks, not just uptime probes.
  • Internal admin endpoints are monitored or explicitly excluded with a reason.

Cadence and geography

  • Production endpoints checked at least every minute.
  • At least two probe regions on independent networks.
  • Probe intervals are documented; nobody silently slows them to save cost.

Alerting

  • Threshold is two consecutive failures from independent regions — not one.
  • Severity ladders escalate to the right people, not the same channel each time.
  • Auto-resolve fires when checks recover, not on a fixed timer.

Continuity

An alert without a workflow is a notification, not monitoring. Every alert should resolve into a saved diagnostics session, a runbook link, and a place to record what was found. The dashboard's continuity feed converts each incident into operational memory.

Recommended next steps

Diagnostic workflow

  1. 1
    Audit a hostname now

    Run an uptime + SSL + DNS sweep to validate the current state.

    Run check
  2. 2
    Configure uptime monitors

    Add hostnames, intervals, and alert routing.

    Open monitors
  3. 3
    Read the uptime monitoring guide

    Deep reference on intervals, regions, and thresholds.

    Read the guide
  4. 4
    Promote learnings to operational best practices

    Lock in patterns so coverage doesn't decay.

    Read best practices

Frequently asked questions

What's the minimum check interval for production?

One minute. Anything slower means a 5-minute outage can register as a single dip — too coarse to catch real incidents.

How many regions should I probe from?

At least two on different networks. Single-region monitors miss BGP, peering, and DNS regional issues entirely.

Should I alert on first failure?

No. Two consecutive failures from independent regions is the standard threshold — fewer false alerts, same true-positive rate.

What belongs in an uptime monitor vs synthetic test?

Uptime monitors confirm reachability and basic response. Synthetic tests confirm a transaction works end-to-end. Both, not either/or.

How do I know my monitoring itself is healthy?

Heartbeats. A monitor that hasn't reported in N minutes is itself an alert — silence is not the same as success.

Continue reading

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