The Complete Guide to Uptime Monitoring for SMBs

Most small teams want two things from monitoring: find out fast when something’s down, and avoid waking people up for false alarms. This guide shows how to design a pragmatic setup using HTTP, ping, and health endpoints—with multi‑region verification and clean escalation.

Related: Ping vs HTTP Monitoring · Minimum Monitoring Interval · Reduce False Positives

What “good” looks like

• Primary HTTP checks on customer-facing endpoints and APIs
• Lightweight ping/TCP checks for network reachability
• Multi‑region validation to avoid local ISP/CDN blips
• Warm-ups & retries to filter transient failures
• Clear routing: who gets notified, when, and via which channel
• Status page updates and short root‑cause notes

See our feature page: Uptime Monitoring.

Choosing the right checks

• HTTP — validates the full path (DNS → TLS → app). Use a /health or /ready endpoint that returns 200 and verifies dependencies quickly.
• Ping/TCP — catches network reachability; doesn’t validate app logic. Use as a signal, not sole source of truth. See Ping vs HTTP Monitoring.
• Synthetics — optional for SMB; reserve for checkout or login if revenue‑critical.

Intervals that balance coverage and noise

Start with 5 minutes for low‑criticality endpoints, 1–2 minutes for customer‑critical endpoints. Move to shorter intervals only after improving false‑positive handling.

More detail: What’s the Minimum Monitoring Interval You Really Need?

Cut false positives without missing real incidents

1. N of M failures (e.g., 2 of 3) before alerting.
2. Multi‑region agreement before paging.
3. Warm-ups after deploys.
4. Channel escalation: Slack/Teams first; SMS/PagerDuty on sustained failure.

See How to Reduce False Positives.

HTTP health endpoint checklist

• Returns 200 with a small JSON body
• Checks critical dependencies quickly
• Times out in < 2s; fails fast
• Requires no auth or a token param passed by the monitor
• Non‑200 responses include hint text for on‑call

{ "status": "ok", "db": "ok", "queue": "ok", "version": "2025.10.02" }

Multi‑region verification

Configure at least 3 regions (e.g., London, Frankfurt, US‑East). Alert only if 2+ regions agree on failure. Keep regions close to users.

Alert routing that respects people’s time

• During hours: send to Slack/Teams; mention the on‑call group.
• Out of hours: escalate to SMS/PagerDuty after confirmation.

Runbooks define who gets what, when. Show status publicly via Status Pages.

Ongoing hygiene

• Review alerts monthly: prune noisy checks, add missing endpoints.
• Track trend reports for availability and MTTR.