Basics of Monitoring

Uptime.com provides industry-leading web monitoring services. What does this mean?

Uptime refers to the time when your website is operational and accessible to users, while downtime is the opposite—it's when your site is inaccessible, experiencing disruptions, or unresponsive. Monitoring these metrics is crucial to ensure the continuous functionality of your online resources and their availability to customers and other users.

The Uptime.com platform uses a network of probe servers that check an internet resource such as a specific website or a section of a website such as a login portal. The probe server receives a response code from the resource, which indicates its status, and this response is reported in the Uptime.com interface as Up or Down.

Some common response codes you may be familiar with include:

• 200 (OK)
• 401 (Unauthorized)
• 404 (Not found)
• 500 (Error with service)

What are Probe Servers?

Probe servers are located in various geographical locations to simulate user access from different regions. By employing probe servers in multiple locations, you can be alerted to outages that may only affect a specific region. Single-location monitoring might also produce false positives due to localized network issues or server problems, so Uptime.com recommends testing each check with at least 2 locations. This minimizes false positives by cross-referencing data from different sources.