Uptime monitoring

Definition

Uptime monitoring is the practice of measuring whether a service is available and meeting basic correctness criteria over time, expressed as availability percentages, incident counts, and timelines.

Why it matters

Buyers and engineering teams use uptime metrics to judge reliability, support SLAs, and prioritize engineering work. It is a coarse but essential signal distinct from deep performance tuning.

Related terms

• Downtime: The complementary period when checks fail or breach thresholds.
• SLA: Often ties availability targets to commitments and penalties.

Notes

Uptime is only as honest as your checks—poor coverage (single region, shallow assertions) can misrepresent user-impacting incidents.