Before you invest in uptime monitoring

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Before you spend anything on uptime monitoring, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• You should not learn about downtime from a customer
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Monitor the checkout, not just the homepage. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Alerts nobody acts on are just noise. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

How to tell if yours is fine

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Three things worth confirming about uptime monitoring before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• You should not learn about downtime from a customer — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.