What is Uptime monitoring?

Uptime monitoring checks a website, API, port or hostname from outside on a fixed interval and records whether it answered correctly and how long it took. A check passes when the target responds within the timeout and meets the success condition, such as an expected HTTP status code or a string in the body.

This practice matters because it detects outages before users notice. Failures are counted, and a monitor alerts after a set number of consecutive failures, so a single blip does not page anyone. Checks run from one or more locations at common intervals of 30 s to 5 min.

AlertKick runs checks every 60 s on paid plans and every 300 s on Free. Uptime is usually reported as a percentage of successful checks over total checks.