The Domain Name System (DNS) is brilliantly designed as a hierarchical structure, ensuring that any single point can fail with the system remaining relatively intact. There are some nuances to this statement, like caching issues that arise from outages, but the overall focus is on uptime. This is why the DNS check is a critical part of your IT uptime monitoring process.

Domain Blacklist checks from Uptime.com will check your site once each day against approximately 100 of the most well-known spam blacklists to determine if your mail server appears on them. Your domain may be flagged as a spam website for sending too many emails, for sending spam emails, or due to repeated reports by email recipients that the site is spam.

Malware / Virus checks from Uptime.com checks your site against two major malware databases. Malware is any type of unwanted or malicious code. Malware includes viruses, which are malware designed to replicate and spread, as well as spyware, adware, trojans and more. A Malware / Virus check uses the Google Safe Browsing List and the Yandex Safe Browsing List to determine if your site has malware.

We live in an incredible global economy where workers from all over the world pitch in to complete major products, develop new technology, and change the world. Here at Uptime.com, our workforce is spread across the globe, and we know many of you reading probably have a similar setup. The benefits of hands on a website at all hours of the day are numerous, so long as connectivity remains alive and well. That’s where a TCP/UDP Check provides immeasurable value.

For about 3 hours at the very beginning of Amazon Prime Day, Amazon’s website experienced outages on both the East and West coasts of the US. Even the world’s largest retailer isn’t prone to technical mishaps. In fact, Amazon’s server infrastructure is reasonably stable. This particular outage is a fascinating study in how Amazon’s website downtime affects a business in real time.

Secure Shell (SSH), is a network protocol that gives administrators secure access to remote computers. It also refers to the suite of utilities that implement the protocol. A SSH check looks at the availability of your SSH services to see if the service is accepting connections.

We here at Uptime.com strive to be on the cutting edge of downtime monitoring across the web. While our tool provides valuable insights into a website’s speed and global uptime, this month the focus was on big brands with huge customer bases. Every outage seemed to affect millions of customers in the US or across the globe.

Uptime’s transaction checks can continually monitor important functionality of your site. Specific steps within a Transaction Check can monitor nearly anything you have a test case for. So, this check is as good as the steps you configure for it. You can think of it as the first response or notification that a portion of critical infrastructure is down.

This morning, though, all of our backlogs were a little harder to sift through thanks to a Slack outage in Europe and the US. To calm down, some of us might have turned to our Google Home or Chromecast to unwind while the outage hours piled up, only to find those were down too! What a morning!Now that Slack is running again, let’s take a moment to reflect on what the outage means and what we can learn from it.

HTTP(S) checks are the most basic checks available on the Uptime platform, but they are by no means simplistic. Adding additional parameters provides important and useful statistics. Your basic HTTP(S) Check monitors a specific web or IP address, with optional parameters that provide additional functionality. It will likely be the first check you create, but the functionality of an HTTP(S) check allows for a variety of valuable escalation scenarios.