Uptime Monitoring

Monitor website availability, performance, and SSL certificates with scheduled health checks

Databuddy’s uptime monitoring continuously checks your website’s availability and performance. Get alerted to downtime, track response times, and monitor SSL certificate expiration.

What is Uptime Monitoring?

Uptime monitoring performs regular health checks on your websites:

• HTTP checks: Verify your site responds correctly
• Response time tracking: Monitor TTFB and total request time
• SSL certificate monitoring: Track expiration dates
• Status code validation: Ensure proper HTTP responses
• Geographic probing: Checks from multiple regions
• Downtime detection: Alert on failures and outages

How It Works

Databuddy uses QStash (by Upstash) for distributed scheduling:

1. Schedule creation: You define check frequency and URL
2. Distributed execution: QStash triggers checks from edge locations
3. HTTP probe: Databuddy’s uptime service fetches your URL
4. Data collection: Records response time, status, SSL info
5. Event streaming: Sends results to Kafka → ClickHouse
6. Analytics: View uptime metrics in dashboard

Uptime checks are performed from different geographic regions to detect regional outages.

Setting Up Monitors

Via Dashboard

1. Navigate to Uptime in the sidebar
2. Click Create Monitor
3. Enter the URL to monitor
4. Configure check settings
5. Click Create

Monitor Configuration

Field	Description	Default
URL	Website URL to monitor	Required
Check Interval	How often to check (minutes)	5 minutes
Timeout	Max time to wait for response (ms)	30,000 ms
Cache Bust	Add random query param to prevent caching	false
Website ID	Link to analytics website	Optional

Example: Basic Monitor

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "checkInterval": 5,
  "timeout": 30000,
  "cacheBust": false
}

Checks example.com every 5 minutes.

Example: Advanced Monitor

{
  "url": "https://api.example.com/health",
  "checkInterval": 1,
  "timeout": 10000,
  "cacheBust": true,
  "websiteId": "website-123"
}

Checks API endpoint every minute with cache busting enabled.

Check Intervals

Choose how frequently to monitor:

• 1 minute: Critical services, APIs
• 5 minutes: Standard websites (recommended)
• 15 minutes: Low-priority sites
• 30 minutes: Backup monitoring
• 1 hour: Cost-effective monitoring

More frequent checks provide faster downtime detection but consume more resources. Balance based on your SLA requirements.

Timeout Configuration

Set maximum wait time for responses:

• 10 seconds: Fast APIs, CDN-backed sites
• 30 seconds: Default (recommended)
• 60 seconds: Slow backends, heavy pages

Requests exceeding the timeout are marked as failures.

Cache Busting

Prevent false positives from cached responses:

• Disabled (default): Standard checks
• Enabled: Adds ?_cb=<random> to URL

Enable for:

• CDN-cached pages
• Aggressive browser caching
• Testing origin server health

Disable for:

• Standard monitoring
• APIs that don’t cache
• Conserving bandwidth

Monitored Metrics

Each check records:

Response Metrics

• HTTP Status Code: 200, 404, 500, etc.
• TTFB (Time to First Byte): Server response time in ms
• Total Time: Complete request duration in ms
• Response Size: Bytes received
• Content Hash: SHA-256 hash for change detection

SSL Metrics

• Certificate Expiry: Unix timestamp of expiration
• Certificate Valid: Boolean indicating validity

Network Metrics

• Redirect Count: Number of HTTP redirects followed
• Probe Region: Geographic location of check
• Probe IP: IP address of monitoring probe

Status

• UP: Successful check (2xx or 3xx status)
• DOWN: Failed check (4xx, 5xx, timeout, or network error)

Databuddy follows up to 10 redirects automatically. Redirect loops are detected and marked as failures.

SSL Certificate Monitoring

Automatic SSL/TLS certificate tracking:

Certificate Checks

• Expiration date: When certificate expires
• Validity: Whether certificate is currently valid
• Issuer: Certificate authority (extracted from cert)

Expiration Alerts

Get notified before certificates expire:

• 30 days before expiration
• 14 days before expiration
• 7 days before expiration
• Day of expiration

Expired SSL certificates cause browser warnings and lost traffic. Monitor expiration closely.

HTTP Status Handling

Success (UP)

• 2xx: OK (200, 201, 204, etc.)
• 3xx: Redirects (301, 302, 307, 308)

Redirects are followed automatically (up to 10 hops).

Failure (DOWN)

• 4xx: Client errors (404, 403, etc.)
• 5xx: Server errors (500, 502, 503, etc.)
• 0: Timeout or network error

Viewing Uptime Data

Monitor Dashboard

View all monitors:

• Current status (UP/DOWN)
• Last check time
• Uptime percentage (24h, 7d, 30d)
• Average response time
• Recent incidents

Monitor Details

Drill down into individual monitors:

• Uptime graph: Visual timeline of status
• Response time chart: TTFB and total time trends
• Incident history: Downtime events with duration
• SSL status: Certificate expiration countdown
• Geographic performance: Response times by region

Metrics Over Time

Analyze trends:

• Hourly: Last 24-48 hours
• Daily: Last 30-90 days
• Weekly: Last 6-12 months

Content Change Detection

Monitor for unexpected page changes:

• Content hash: SHA-256 hash of response body
• Change detection: Alerts when hash changes
• False positive filtering: Ignore dynamic timestamps, ads

Use cases:

• Detect defacement
• Monitor for unauthorized changes
• Track deployment success

JSON Response Parsing

Monitor API responses with custom validation:

JSON Parsing Config

Extract specific JSON fields:

{
  "jsonParsingConfig": {
    "enabled": true,
    "path": "$.data.status",
    "expectedValue": "healthy"
  }
}

This checks that response.data.status === "healthy".

Use Cases

• API health endpoints
• Microservice status pages
• Custom validation logic
• Extract metrics from responses

JSON parsing lets you monitor API health beyond just HTTP status codes.

Failure Handling

Retry Logic

Failed checks are retried:

1. Initial check fails
2. Wait 30 seconds
3. Retry (up to 3 times)
4. Mark as DOWN if all retries fail

This prevents false alarms from transient network issues.

Failure Streaks

Track consecutive failures:

• Streak count: Number of consecutive DOWN checks
• Alert threshold: Notify after 2-3 consecutive failures
• Recovery: Streak resets on first UP check

Infrastructure

Databuddy’s uptime service architecture:

• Runtime: Bun + Elysia
• Scheduler: Upstash QStash (distributed cron)
• Database: PostgreSQL (monitor configs)
• Analytics: Kafka + ClickHouse (check results)
• Observability: OpenTelemetry → Axiom

Request Flow

QStash schedule trigger
  ↓
Uptime service receives webhook
  ↓
Verify QStash signature
  ↓
Lookup monitor config (PostgreSQL)
  ↓
Perform HTTP check with timeout
  ↓
Check SSL certificate (if HTTPS)
  ↓
Get probe metadata (IP, region)
  ↓
Send event to Kafka
  ↓
ClickHouse ingestion
  ↓
Dashboard analytics

Security

Webhook Verification

QStash webhooks are cryptographically verified:

const isValid = await receiver.verify({
  body,
  signature,
  url: process.env.UPTIME_URL
})

Unverified requests are rejected with 401.

Request Headers

Uptime checks use realistic browser headers:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) ...
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,...
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Cache-Control: no-cache

This ensures compatibility with sites that block bots.

Compression Support

Automatic response decompression:

• Tries gzip, deflate, br first
• Falls back to gzip, deflate on encoding errors
• Handles corrupt compression gracefully

Best Practices

Monitor Critical Pages

Prioritize monitoring:

1. Homepage
2. Login/signup pages
3. Checkout/payment flows
4. API endpoints
5. Critical content pages

Choose Appropriate Intervals

• Mission-critical: 1-minute checks
• Production websites: 5-minute checks
• Staging/dev: 15-minute checks
• Backup monitors: 30-minute checks

Set Realistic Timeouts

• Fast sites: 5-10 seconds
• Average sites: 30 seconds (default)
• Slow backends: 60 seconds

Avoid overly aggressive timeouts that cause false alarms.

Monitor SSL Expiration

For HTTPS sites:

• Enable certificate monitoring
• Set up 30-day expiration alerts
• Use Let’s Encrypt auto-renewal where possible

Use JSON Parsing for APIs

Go beyond status codes:

• Check response structure
• Validate specific fields
• Monitor API contract compliance

Alerts & Notifications

Alert Channels

Configure notifications:

• Email
• Slack
• Discord
• Webhook (custom integrations)
• SMS (via Twilio)

Alert Conditions

• Site goes DOWN (after retry logic)
• Site recovers (returns UP)
• SSL certificate expires in less than 30 days
• Response time exceeds threshold
• Content hash changes unexpectedly

Alert configuration is available in the monitor settings page.

Uptime SLA Calculation

Calculate uptime percentage:

Uptime % = (Successful Checks / Total Checks) × 100

Example

• Total checks: 288 (24h × 12 checks/hour)
• Failed checks: 3
• Uptime: (285 / 288) × 100 = 98.96%

Industry Standards

• 99.9% (“three nines”): 43 minutes downtime/month
• 99.95%: 22 minutes downtime/month
• 99.99% (“four nines”): 4 minutes downtime/month

Exporting Uptime Data

Export monitor data for analysis:

1. Open monitor details
2. Select date range
3. Click Export
4. Choose format (CSV or JSON)
5. Download data

Exports include all check results, response times, and status changes.

Next Steps

Analytics

Analyze uptime trends and patterns

AI Insights

Ask the AI about uptime performance

Alerts Setup

Configure uptime notifications

API Reference

Programmatic monitor management