Best Uptime Monitoring 2026

Yes — they catch different failure modes. Error monitoring tells you about exceptions thrown inside a running application; uptime monitoring tells you when the application isn't responding at all (server down, DNS failure, SSL expiry, network issue). A site that's completely down often won't throw any application errors for Sentry to catch.

For most production services, checks every 1–5 minutes are standard — frequent enough to catch outages quickly without generating excessive false-positive alerts from transient blips. Critical revenue-generating endpoints sometimes warrant 30-second checks; low-stakes internal tools can run checks every 10–15 minutes.

A status page (offered by Better Uptime, Pingdom, and others) is a public-facing page showing your service's current and historical uptime, often with incident updates posted during outages. It reduces support load during incidents — customers check the status page instead of all emailing support simultaneously — and is increasingly expected by B2B customers as a trust signal.

If you're already paying for a full observability platform for APM and infrastructure metrics, its built-in synthetic/uptime checks are often sufficient and keep everything in one place. If you only need uptime checks and nothing else, a dedicated tool (UptimeRobot, Better Uptime) is cheaper and simpler than paying for a full platform just for this one feature.

Tools like Checkly let you define your uptime and synthetic browser checks in code (often using Playwright), stored in your repository and reviewed via pull request like any other change — instead of clicking through a separate dashboard UI. This matters most for engineering teams who want monitoring configuration to go through the same review and deployment process as application code.