Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
1. List what users depend on
Start from the user's side, not the server's. Write down the pages and endpoints that people use: the home page, sign-in, the main app page, checkout, the public API, and the jobs that send email or invoices. That list is your first set of monitors.
2. Choose the right check for each
| What | Check |
|---|---|
| A page that must load | HTTP, expecting 200 |
| A page that can fail while returning 200 | Keyword: a phrase that only appears when it works |
| An API | HTTP on a health endpoint that checks the database |
| A server or service without a web page | Ping or port |
| A certificate | Comes with every HTTPS check |
| A scheduled job | Heartbeat |
3. Pick intervals
Every 30 seconds to 1 minute for anything people pay for or sign in to; every 5 minutes for content pages; less often for things that change slowly. A long interval misses short outages entirely; see check intervals.
4. Confirm before alerting
Set at least one confirmation check, so a single failed request is checked again before anyone is told. For services whose deploys fail for a minute, set enough re-checks to outlast them. See confirmation checks.
5. Send alerts to the right people
- Each service's alerts go to the team that owns it, in the chat tool they use.
- Email for people who need to know but not act.
- Reminders only on critical services, so an unacknowledged outage keeps reminding people.
6. Tell customers
Publish a status page built from the same monitors, on a subdomain such as status.yourcompany.com. Link it from your help pages and error messages.
7. Review after a month
Look at every alert you received. For each one nobody needed, change a setting: more confirmation, a longer interval, a different channel or a better keyword. For each outage you heard about late, shorten the interval or add the check that would have caught it.
Doing it in Upcertain
Guided setup takes one website and creates its checks in one step; CSV import takes a whole list. Six monitor types, confirmation per monitor, six alert channels and status pages are on every plan. Start with the website monitoring overview.