What Is Uptime Monitoring? A Quick Guide for Makers

Uptime monitoring means something (usually a service) repeatedly checks your website or API to see if it's responding. If a check fails, you know there's a problem—often before users start complaining.

How it works

A monitor sends a request (typically HTTP GET) to your URL at a set interval—e.g. every 5 minutes. If the response is successful (e.g. 200 OK), the check is "up." If the request fails or times out, the check is "down." Over time you get a history of uptime and response times.

Why it matters

• You find out about outages quickly instead of learning from user reports.
• You have data (uptime %, latency) to improve reliability.
• You can show that data on a status page so users trust you more.

What you need

You need a list of URLs to check and a service that runs the checks and stores the results. Many tools do this for you; you add URLs, they run the pings and optionally host a status page for you. No need to run your own cron jobs or dashboards.