Welcome to the companion post to So You Received an Alert. Now What? Last time, we broke down the process between receiving the Uptime.com check alert and figuring out what broke. Today, we’re going to show you how to communicate your efforts so that everyone – your end users, coworkers, and bosses – know what’s going on. Your first step is to update your Status Page, your central hub for incident management and communication.

Your phone buzzes with an incoming text message right when you’re about to start dinner. Inconvenient, but better than a 3 am call. It’s an Uptime.com Alert, and if you want to clear it before your dinner gets cold you need the right tools for investigation… If that scenario sounds familiar to you, then you’re in good (if tired) company.

If you’ve ever had a website or service go down as you were using it, then you’ll understand the irritation of a generic error message and a plea to “Be patient!” (if you’re lucky). It’s almost like they know they’re not telling you the full story. The companies that are on top of their outage game will have a prepared link or redirect to their Status Page (or at least, have one prominently displayed on their pages and social media) for times like these.

Service Level Agreements are designed to foster trust between your customers and your business. They help define the maximum amount of downtime your team finds acceptable. While they can have legal repercussions, SLAs are fundamentally about trust. Your customers use your service because you’re the best at what you do. They remain loyal because they trust you to do what they need. Retention in SaaS is very fickle, and competition in certain spaces is quite stiff.

Employees are returning from vacation, the weather is (finally) cooling down and summer is coming to a close. It can feel a bit overwhelming returning to work and getting back into the swing of things. When it comes to website monitoring, there are simple steps you can take to make sure your transition is as smooth as possible. Take advantage of a few ounces of pre-vacation prevention to save on pounds of post-holiday cure.

I’m a recent entrant to the Website Monitoring game, but there is one thing I realized straight away: A Monitoring tool is only as good as it’s configured to be. Website monitoring is at its best when it’s reliable, informative, and efficient. When it gives you the information you need, when you need it, and the peace of mind to say “if I’m not being alerted, I know it’s still working.”

If you are in a room with 20 engineers and you ask, “explain what an API is to a non-technical person”, you will get 20 different analogies. An API is like the on button to your TV connecting you to a variety of shows and systems, or an API is like a waiter taking your order and serving you from the kitchen. An API is like a library card catalog, or it’s simply a tool that connects you to other tools.

Synthetic monitoring is a useful tool that ensures your site is both UP and performs well, and configuration matters. Optimized synthetic monitoring looks for necessary elements along a focused goal pathway. A poorly configured check can add precious seconds to a Transaction and trigger unwanted Global Timeout errors. Today, we’re going to do a deep dive on tips and tricks used by Uptime.com Support and Development teams to improve and optimize the Transaction checks we use everyday.

It’s already been a stormy quarter with notable outages exceeding 240 hours. This spring saw two substantial cloud provider outages between Atlassian’s 9 day outage and shorter outages with CloudFlare. As reliance on cloud-based tools and services increases you should be asking, what are the best ways to monitor your site and make sure the data you’re reporting accurately reflects your site’s downtime and SLAs?

The Uptime.com monitoring Transaction check just got a few upgrades bringing more granular control to users with complex checks. If you have found yourself struggling with performance in synthetic monitoring, this upgrade is for you. Plus better diagnostic tools to analyze every request we encountered. Available to every Uptime.com user, today we want to introduce these important tools and walk though some use cases that will help you get the most out of them.