Getting started with uptime monitoring
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A short on-ramp to uptime monitoring for teams who have not touched it before.
The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
What is actually at stake
You should not learn about downtime from a customer. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Monitor the checkout, not just the homepage
- Change one thing and measure it
Alerts nobody acts on are just noise. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The short version
Security is a maintenance habit rather than a purchase, which is why it drifts. Three things worth confirming about uptime monitoring before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Monitor the checkout, not just the homepage — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.