What to ask your agency about uptime monitoring

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on uptime monitoring, these questions are worth asking early.

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

You should not learn about downtime from a customer. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Alerts nobody acts on are just noise. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

In practice

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
• Alerts nobody acts on are just noise — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.