AppSignal is your one-stop shop for application monitoring. Today, we're releasing uptime monitoring. Simply add any endpoint you want to check for uptime and AppSignal will monitor it from locations around the globe, 24/7.

Uptime monitoring expands our current feature set (error tracking, performance monitoring, metric dashboards, server metrics, and anomaly detection). All features are combined in a beautiful and easy-to-use interface, with a friendly pricing model for developers.

Why Use Uptime Monitoring?

Imagine the following situation:

Your throughput is down by 10%. There's no long line of background jobs waiting to be processed, nor is there a high error rate. Smooth sailing, you may say.

In some cases, these metrics may indicate that you've lost one ship from your fleet of servers. To be more precise, the ship you deployed in the South Americas region is now swimming with the sharks ⛴ 🐠 🦈

This is why uptime monitoring is your first line of defense against downtime. You'll know that your app is down before your clients tell you so, and you'll be able to figure out what the root cause of the downtime is.

How Uptime Monitoring Works

Pick your endpoint

Any public-facing URL works for uptime monitoring, but you should be mindful of skewing the monitoring data since it will hit that endpoint 4 times a minute, 24/7. You can monitor as many endpoints as you want.

Configure your uptime check

Provide a name, notification channel, warmup period, and add an internal message for when your application is down. You can add custom headers if that is needed for the uptime check to be accepted.

Pinging once a minute from 4 locations

We'll ping your endpoint once a minute from North America, South America, Europe, and the Asian-Pacific region. This way you'll know of any global network issues, too.

Get insights and alerts

We'll alert you if we receive any response outside of the HTTP 200 response range. Each uptime monitor keeps a history of downtimes and gives you a graph with response times per region.

A Peek Behind the Code-curtain

We used to get a lot of requests from customers to add uptime monitoring. At first, we thought it would be a very big undertaking to build it. Then, one Friday afternoon in a shaping session, the team came up with a way to build uptime monitoring using many existing parts of our architecture. We’ll write more about building this feature, and our thought process behind it, in a future post.

Uptime Monitoring: Included in All Plans

AppSignal is not interested in squeezing the last bit of money out of our customers through complicated plans and tiers. Instead, all our plans include all our features and the only thing you pay for is the number of requests you use.

If you are already using AppSignal, you can set up your uptime monitoring here. If you're new and you'd like to give AppSignal a spin, start a 30 day free trial (no credit card needed). 👋