24/7 monitoring for websites: what it should include

24/7 monitoring means a service checks your website or server continuously, day and night, including weekends and holidays. Outages don't respect office hours, so neither should your monitoring. This page covers what 24/7 uptime monitoring includes, and what to demand from any tool that claims it.

A proper 24/7 monitor does three things:

• Detects downtime fast, typically within a minute or two of the first failure
• Verifies the problem is real, usually by rechecking from a different location, so a single flaky network doesn't page you at 3 AM
• Sends the alert to wherever you are, whether that's email, Slack, SMS, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or a custom webhook

What 24/7 monitoring should include #

Checks every minute catch the obvious outage. A good 24/7 monitor also catches what a 200 response hides:

• Uptime checks every minute, with downtime verified from a second location before anyone is alerted
• SSL certificate monitoring, so an expiring certificate is found by you, not by a customer
• DNS monitoring, because a changed or deleted record takes a site down while every server stays "up"
• Scheduled-task monitoring, so a missed or late cron heartbeat is flagged, with run times tracked against the schedule you set
• Broken page and mixed-content detection, for the "200 OK but nothing loads" class of failure
• A hosted status page, so you can communicate with clients while your own stack is impaired
• An independent incident record you can show a client.

If you look after client sites, you want two things. You hear about it first, not the client, and you can show what happened when something broke at 3 AM on a Sunday.

What 24/7 monitoring cannot do #

Two limits worth knowing before you buy:

• Outside-in checks see what the outside sees. A 24/7 website monitor requests your site the way a visitor would and reports what it observes. It does not script synthetic checkout flows or multi-step transactions.
• Heartbeat monitoring tells you a job ran, not that it produced the right result. It detects missing or late heartbeats and tracks run timing. It does not check the outcome.

Start monitoring for free #

Oh Dear does all of this. Checks run every minute from multiple locations, every downtime is verified before alerting, and notifications go out through more than a dozen channels. Start monitoring for free. 10 day trial, no credit card required, and you're all set in less than a minute.