Uptime monitoring for websites, APIs and services

Uptime monitoring is the practice of checking, on a fixed schedule and from outside your own network, whether a service is reachable and responding correctly. Checks typically run every 30 seconds to 10 minutes from probe locations around the world. Because the checks originate externally, they catch failures your internal dashboards cannot see — DNS problems, expired certificates, and regional outages.

Match the frequency to the cost of the outage. Revenue-critical endpoints justify 30-second checks; internal tooling is usually fine at 5 or 10 minutes. Higher frequency shortens the time between a failure starting and you hearing about it, but consumes more of your check quota. openstatus supports 30s, 1m, 5m and 10m intervals depending on your plan.

Uptime is what your monitor measures: the proportion of checks that succeeded. Availability is what your users experienced, which includes degraded performance your checks may have passed. A service returning HTTP 200 in eight seconds is up but arguably not available. This is why thresholds matter alongside assertions — they let you count slow responses as degraded rather than healthy.

Yes. Deploy a private location probe inside your network as an 8.5MB Docker container and it appears as another monitoring region in your dashboard. The probe reaches out to openstatus, so no inbound firewall rule is needed. You can run as many private locations as you like across different VPCs or networks.

Create an HTTP monitor pointing at the endpoint, choose the method, and add any headers your API needs for authentication. For GraphQL, send a POST with the query in the body. Then add assertions on the status code, response headers, or body content so the monitor verifies the response is correct rather than merely present, and set a threshold so slow responses register as degraded.

The free Hobby plan includes one monitor at a 10-minute interval with no credit card. Paid plans start at $30/month for Starter (20 monitors, 1-minute checks, 6 regions per monitor), $100/month for Pro (50 monitors, 30-second checks, all 28 regions), and $500/month for Scale. Annual billing gives you two months free.

Start with 3-5 regions covering your main user geographies. More regions provide better global coverage but use more check quota. For critical services, monitor from all major regions (North America, Europe, Asia) to catch regional issues quickly.

If your service runs on AWS and your monitoring also runs on AWS, you won't detect AWS-wide outages or network issues affecting AWS connectivity. Using Fly.io, Koyeb, and Railway ensures monitoring independence from your infrastructure provider.

Frequency determines how often we check your service (e.g., every 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes). Higher frequency (30s) catches issues faster but uses more checks. Lower frequency (10m) is sufficient for non-critical services and conserves quota.

Yes, you can configure monitors to automatically update your status page based on monitoring results. When assertions fail or thresholds are exceeded, the status page can reflect degraded or down status without manual intervention.

Assertions validate response correctness (status code, headers, body content) while thresholds define performance boundaries (degraded latency, timeout). Both can trigger alerts - assertions catch functional failures, thresholds catch performance degradation.

You can monitor any HTTP/HTTPS endpoint including REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, webhooks, and third-party service endpoints. Openstatus supports all HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) and custom headers for authentication.

Use YAML + CLI for simplicity and if you're not already using Terraform. It's lightweight and easy to get started. Choose Terraform if you're managing infrastructure as code and want to integrate monitoring into your existing Terraform workflows for unified state management.

Yes, you can deploy as many private location probes as needed across different networks, VPCs, or regions. Each gets its own API key and appears as a separate monitoring region in your dashboard. The Docker image is only 8.5MB and supports ARM64 and AMD64.