Uptime’s transaction checks can continually monitor important functionality of your site. Specific steps within a Transaction Check can monitor nearly anything you have a test case for. So, this check is as good as the steps you configure for it. You can think of it as the first response or notification that a portion of critical infrastructure is down.

This morning, though, all of our backlogs were a little harder to sift through thanks to a Slack outage in Europe and the US. To calm down, some of us might have turned to our Google Home or Chromecast to unwind while the outage hours piled up, only to find those were down too! What a morning!Now that Slack is running again, let’s take a moment to reflect on what the outage means and what we can learn from it.

HTTP(S) checks are the most basic checks available on the Uptime platform, but they are by no means simplistic. Adding additional parameters provides important and useful statistics. Your basic HTTP(S) Check monitors a specific web or IP address, with optional parameters that provide additional functionality. It will likely be the first check you create, but the functionality of an HTTP(S) check allows for a variety of valuable escalation scenarios.

Uptime Status Pages can now be shared publicly. You will find that they are a useful tool for information sharing under a variety of circumstances. Internal pages offer excellent insight for your team, but public status pages provide users and other parties helpful information about your services and websites.