Monitoring a website can already mean hundreds of checks on all sorts of different pathways, URLs, and other services. Monitoring multiple websites is an ever growing web that can make you start to feel like you’re trapped in an episode of Law & Order. The format of the show (I am talking about the real Law & Order, not its offshoots) involves the crime from occurrence to trial outcome and every beat and interrogation in between.

Monitoring for uptime is becoming increasingly necessary as SaaS and Always-On services integrate deeper with our professional and personal lives. When bottom lines and infrastructure requirements are tied so closely to 24/7 accessibility, making sure your websites are UP becomes priority one. We’ve scoured our support tickets, talked to our users, and kept an ear to the ground to compile the top 10 questions surrounding uptime monitoring and break down the answers.

Did you know that California was one of the earliest adopters in the world for earthquake automated detection? Though rudimentary, early systems were literally horns strapped to government buildings, the idea was simple: sound an alarm the moment that an earthquake could be confirmed. The critical period of warning residents get can prove the difference between finding shelter and securing your family. In a land where earthquakes level buildings, detection was critical.

Everyone has heard about the 3 AM wakeup call, but what about those troublesome issues that dig at your team and eat away at your SLA hours? Hard-to-diagnose issues can strike at any time. They leach from your team, hurt morale, impede the customer experience… it’s just a whole mess. These kinds of incidents are ones that test what “response” really means to your organization, as fixing them is not always a simple task. Something has gone wrong.

If all you have is the beginning and the end, you’re left with a short, boring story: “Once upon a time, it was UP…then, it was DOWN.” Knowing the twists and turns of your transaction pathways is not only illuminating, but profitable. Information channels dry up when all you have are pieces.

HR people have a saying: right person, right place, right time, meaning that the right resources can make all the difference when it counts. The same goes for Incident management and response, where very often the wrong person, place, or time can contribute to mounting catastrophe. As systems grow, the right person really can make the difference during an outage simply due to command or knowledge of the system.

Once upon a time there was the internet, and it was good, and it was global. We built our businesses across its networks and expanded our commerce from computer to cloud. Like with any physical trade route, the journeys are not always consistent. If your website is your flagship, your reports are your map. Sites rely on servers and it’s possible that your site might be UP in the UK but DOWN in Dallas.

Having a Status Page is like having a dog. A dog alerts you to an incident; sudden noise, approaching neighbor, squirrel… A dog sounds the alarm on an intruder. A dog even alerts you to maintenance by barking at every handyman, garbage truck, and gardener within sight. As a dog fetches the same stick over and over, so does a status page fetch the attention of your users – especially during a live incident – with each browser refresh they wait for the status to change.

Chaos theory tells us that disruption strongly relates to time; and that the interval between chaos events either increases or decreases based on the amount of action. It sounds like a complex concept but the internet has managed to prove this theory and make it viral – not Rick Roll viral, more like DogeCoin viral – where profits are instantly influenced by volatile popularity. Inside the internet, speed equals profit so it makes sense to monitor it…but what does that mean?

Oh no. Your website is down. And regardless of what time it is we guarantee it’s not a convenient time for your website to crash. An outage can cause a panicked fight-or-flight response when teams are unprepared for the consequences. One of the worst ways to deal with downtime is to try and wait it out thinking it’ll just magically resolve itself.