We use a tool called "Uptime Robot" for our support & maintenance sites, which makes regular calls to websites and reports back to us about the status when it detects error messages for more than 3 minutes. The tool helps us to sort outages based on the responses that are returned by the sites and filter through when downtime might be related to a particular host or service issue.
This means a few things:
1. Our tool does not monitor for slowness or functionality. This tool does not monitor functionality on the website or test for site speed. If certain parts of your site are down, such as search, or if your site is running slowly in general, our monitoring tools will not catch it.
2. We won’t catch everything! If your site is down for just a few minutes (this happens often, depending on the host), we won’t receive alerts.
3. We won’t always reach out to you if your site is down. Very often, downtime is quickly resolved by a hosting provider or the result of infrastructure changes that are not optional.
4. We won’t see issues that come in overnight. We’re not a 24/7 shop, so if any issues occur overnight and need follow-up, we’ll reach out to you in the morning of the next business day.
If we see an ongoing pattern in small outages, a prolonged outage that is unique to you, and/or outage patterns with specific hosts, we’ll reach out to you to at least recommend next steps if not provide a remediation plan.