Guide · Observability
How to Monitor Uptime for Small SaaS
Small teams need uptime monitoring too. Here's how to set it up in minutes with free and paid options.
Uptime checks are baseline Observability—pair them with AI path SLIs when assistants are customer-facing. Primary control: Observability
Customers shouldn't be your pager
If nothing pings your URL, login, API, and payment paths, users discover outages first. One team watched the DB exhaust connections at 2am and learned at 9am from email—seven hours dark. A 1–5 minute external check would have woken someone in minutes.
Minimum viable monitoring for a small team
Pick something cheap and boring: UptimeRobot (free tier), Better Uptime, Pingdom, or CloudWatch Synthetics if you're already on AWS. Check the homepage *and* `/api/health` (or login/checkout)—homepage-only misses API death. Alert to Slack/email/PagerDuty; a green dashboard nobody watches isn't monitoring.
Multi-region checks catch "works from your office, dead elsewhere." A simple status page buys trust when you're already paging.
Observability starts with "is it up?"
APRF Observability expects detection before customers file tickets. Wire uptime into the same on-call path as error spikes; logs without alerts still leave you blind overnight.
Next: Observability
Open the related pillar specification for mandatory checks, artifacts, and pass conditions. Self-attest is optional.
Related
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best uptime monitoring for small SaaS?
- UptimeRobot offers a free tier with 5-minute checks and email alerts. It's a good starting point for small teams. Upgrade to Pingdom or CloudWatch as you grow.
- How often should I check uptime?
- Every 1–5 minutes for critical endpoints. 5 minutes is fine for most small SaaS. More frequent checks cost more and may hit rate limits.
- Do I need a status page?
- Not required, but helpful. A status page lets users know you're aware of issues. Better Uptime and Statuspage.io offer this.