Uptime Monitoring: 7 Checks That Catch 95% of Outages (2026)
Setting up uptime monitoring is easy. Setting it up well takes a bit more thought. If you are also running background tasks, our <a href='/guides/monitor-cron-jobs'>guide to monitoring cron jobs</a> covers dead man switch monitoring for scheduled work. The difference between a monitoring setup that catches real issues and one that drowns you in false alerts comes down to a few key decisions: what to monitor, how often to check, how to route alerts, and when to escalate. Here are the practices that matter most.
Key Points
Monitor what matters, not everything
Focus on critical paths — your homepage, login endpoint, API health check, payment flow, and any endpoint your customers depend on. Monitoring every internal route creates noise. Monitor the endpoints that would wake you up at 3 AM if they went down.
Set the right check interval
30-second checks for critical production APIs. 1-minute checks for important pages. 5-minute checks for staging or low-priority services. Faster checks mean faster detection, but you need to balance speed against alert sensitivity.
Confirm before alerting
A single failed check could be a network blip. Configure your monitoring to require 2-3 consecutive failures before triggering an alert. This eliminates false positives without significantly delaying real alerts.
Use a public status page
A status page reduces support volume during incidents and builds trust with users. Canary generates one automatically from your monitors — no extra setup required.
Why Canary?
- Fast checks — monitor endpoints every 30 seconds with instant downtime alerts.
- Status pages — share real-time uptime with your users. Built in, no extra setup.
- Free tier — get started with 5 monitors at no cost. No credit card required.
Start monitoring now
The 7-check stack used by sites hitting 99.9% SLA: HTTP, DNS, SSL expiry, content match, latency, cron, and status-page monitoring. Real config examples.
Create Free Account