Guide · Observability
No Uptime Monitoring: The Risks
Without uptime monitoring, you find out about outages from users. Here's the risk and how to fix it.
Unmonitored downtime fails Observability—detect before customers do. Primary control: Observability
Customers should not be your pager
If nothing probes your endpoints, a 2am database connection exhaustion becomes a 9am customer email and seven hours of silent downtime. APRF Observability starts with knowing the service is up—before humans complain.
That overnight outage pattern is common for small SaaS: no external check, no Slack, no page.
Probe what money depends on
Ping more than the marketing homepage. Cover login, primary API health, and payment or checkout paths every 1–5 minutes. Use at least two regions so a single probe site does not lie. Alert to email, Slack, or PagerDuty—dashboards you never open do not count.
Tools: UptimeRobot (free tier), Pingdom, CloudWatch Synthetics, or similar. Add SSL expiry checks while you are there.
Close the loop
A simple status page tells users you already know. Tie failed checks into the same incident path as infra SEVs. Uptime alone is not an AI SLO—but without it you will never get to latency budgets.
Next: Observability
Open the related pillar specification for mandatory checks, artifacts, and pass conditions. Self-attest is optional.
Related
Frequently asked questions
- What happens if I have no uptime monitoring?
- You find out about outages from users, not when they start. Downtime can last hours. Uptime monitoring alerts you in minutes so you can fix issues faster.
- What is the best free uptime monitoring?
- UptimeRobot offers a free tier with 5-minute checks and email alerts. AWS CloudWatch Synthetics has a free tier. Both are good starting points.
- What endpoints should I monitor?
- Monitor your main app URL, login endpoint, API, and payment flow. Don't just monitor the homepage—critical paths matter most.