When uptime monitoring is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Uptime monitoring is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is worth it

You should not learn about downtime from a customer. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How to decide

Alerts nobody acts on are just noise. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.