What Is Uptime Monitoring?
Learn what uptime monitoring is, why it matters for websites and web apps, and how to set up alerts so you know about outages before your users do.
Definition
Uptime monitoring checks whether your website or web application is available and responding correctly from the internet. A monitoring service requests your URLs on a schedule and alerts you when something fails.
Uptime is usually expressed as a percentage over time — for example, 99.9% uptime means roughly 8.7 hours of downtime per year.
What gets monitored
Effective uptime monitoring goes beyond a simple ping. Common checks include:
- HTTP status codes (200 OK vs 5xx errors)
- Response time and latency trends
- SSL certificate expiry
- Critical page content or API health endpoints
- Multi-region checks to catch regional outages
Why uptime monitoring matters
Downtime costs revenue, erodes trust, and can hurt search visibility if crawlers repeatedly hit errors. Internal teams often learn about outages from customers first — monitoring reverses that.
For SaaS and e-commerce sites, even short outages during peak hours can have outsized impact. Proactive alerts let you respond in minutes instead of hours.
Uptime monitoring with AppScan AI
AppScan AI includes 24/7 uptime monitoring alongside security audits. Add your sites from the dashboard, configure alert channels, and get notified when availability or SSL health changes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related guides
Put this into practice
Run a free website security audit to see how your site scores on security, performance, SEO, and AEO.