Uptime Monitoring with Healthchecks and Alerts

Why Uptime Monitoring?

You need to know when your services go down — before your customers tell you.

Simple HTTP Health Checks

Endpoint Design

// /health endpoint in your app
app.get('/health', async (req, res) => {
    try {
        // Check database connection
        await db.query('SELECT 1');

        // Check Redis connection
        await redis.ping();

        res.json({
            status: 'healthy',
            uptime: process.uptime(),
            timestamp: new Date().toISOString()
        });
    } catch (err) {
        res.status(503).json({
            status: 'unhealthy',
            error: err.message
        });
    }
});

What to Check

Self-Hosted: Uptime Kuma

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  uptime-kuma:
    image: louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
    ports:
      - "3001:3001"
    volumes:
      - uptime-data:/app/data
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  uptime-data:

Features:

• HTTP, TCP, Ping, DNS monitoring
• Beautiful dashboard
• Notifications via email, Slack, Discord, Telegram
• Status pages for customers
• Certificate expiry monitoring

Alerting Best Practices

Notification Channels

Critical (server down): SMS + Phone call + Slack
Warning (high CPU):     Slack + Email
Info (deployment):      Slack only

Alert Fatigue Prevention

Monitoring Checklist

Tip Monitor from outside your infrastructure. If your monitoring server is on the same network as your web server, a network outage takes down both — and you won't get alerted.