Accountability is an important part of the work IT professionals do, especially when it comes to security and outages. A minor change by a single tech or engineer can crash entire systems, and it’s sometimes crucial to question that person on their methods and changes to determine a solution. Accountability is especially important when several people are regularly using the same tool.

API checks are as simple or complex as you need them to be, offering a great deal of functionality in checking the uptime of your own tools. Combined with a powerful programming interface like REST API, your checks can prove quite useful. These checks are multi-step, meaning you can ask it to do almost anything so long as you present those requests in a syntax your server understands. The key to an API check is formatting your requests properly.

We want to begin this post by thanking our long-time Uptime.com members for bearing with us through the transition to our new user interface. You have no doubt noticed the changes. The adjustments to the UI are small, but some important features are now in a different place. Our intent was a more intuitive design. Today, we’ll walk you through some of our most important decisions in this post. First, we’ll document some changes to be aware of.

Because email is communication is prevalent in today’s business landscape, use Uptime.com’s email server checks to continually monitor email server status. Let’s get familiar with the three different types of email checks you can implement. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) checks monitor the flow of email across the Internet.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is brilliantly designed as a hierarchical structure, ensuring that any single point can fail with the system remaining relatively intact. There are some nuances to this statement, like caching issues that arise from outages, but the overall focus is on uptime. This is why the DNS check is a critical part of your IT uptime monitoring process.

Domain Blacklist checks from Uptime.com will check your site once each day against approximately 100 of the most well-known spam blacklists to determine if your mail server appears on them. Your domain may be flagged as a spam website for sending too many emails, for sending spam emails, or due to repeated reports by email recipients that the site is spam.

Malware / Virus checks from Uptime.com checks your site against two major malware databases. Malware is any type of unwanted or malicious code. Malware includes viruses, which are malware designed to replicate and spread, as well as spyware, adware, trojans and more. A Malware / Virus check uses the Google Safe Browsing List and the Yandex Safe Browsing List to determine if your site has malware.