Uptime Monitoring Checklist: What to Track Before You Launch

Launch week is exactly the wrong time to discover a gap in your monitoring. It's when traffic is least predictable, when you're least likely to be sitting calmly at a desk watching a dashboard, and when a problem is most likely to be seen by the exact people you most want to make a good first impression on.

It's also the week when the most things are new and untested at once: new infrastructure under real load for the first time, new payment flows processing real money for the first time, new background jobs running on a real schedule for the first time. Every one of those is a place something can quietly break, and the checklist below is built around exactly those first-week failure points, not just the obvious "is the site up" question.

Here's what to have in place before that first visitor shows up, not after the first thing breaks.

Core Availability Checks

Start with the obvious, but don't stop there:

• Your main website or app, checked over HTTP(S), confirming it actually loads, not just that a server responds
• Every distinct API endpoint your product depends on, not just the homepage, a broken checkout API can be invisible on a status check that only watches the marketing site
• Any subdomain that matters independently, an app subdomain, a docs subdomain, an API subdomain, each one can fail without the others noticing
• Database and cache ports, if you're running your own Postgres, Redis, or similar, a TCP check confirming the port is actually reachable catches connection-level failures that an application-level check might miss

A common mistake at this stage is monitoring only the homepage and assuming it represents everything else. It doesn't. The homepage is often the least likely thing to break, since it's usually the simplest, most-cached, least-dependent part of a product. The parts worth worrying about are the ones with more moving parts behind them.

Certificate and Domain Checks

These are two different failure modes that get confused for each other constantly, and both are entirely preventable with a calendar and a monitor, yet both cause real incidents regularly:

• SSL certificate expiry, watching the certificate itself, not just whether the site currently loads over HTTPS
• Domain registration renewal, a separate thing entirely from the certificate, and just as capable of taking your entire product offline if it lapses, sometimes for days while a registrar dispute gets sorted out
• DNS resolution for every hostname you depend on, confirming records still resolve, especially after any DNS provider migration or zone file change

Set auto-renewal on both your domain and your certificate wherever possible, and monitor them anyway. Auto-renewal fails silently often enough that it shouldn't be trusted blindly, a failed payment method, an expired administrative email address, or a registrar-side hiccup can all quietly break auto-renewal without any obvious warning until the expiry date arrives.

Background Jobs and Data Integrity

Anything running on a schedule needs its own coverage, since none of the checks above will notice if a background process silently stops running:

• Backup jobs, and not just that they run, that they've actually been tested to restore successfully at least once before you need them for real
• Billing and subscription renewal jobs, especially in the first weeks after launch when every customer is new and a missed charge is easy to miss noticing
• Webhook processing, particularly from payment providers like Stripe, a webhook endpoint that silently stops processing events can mean customers are charged without their accounts being properly provisioned, one of the most common and most damaging launch-week failures
• Email and notification jobs, digest emails, transactional emails, anything a customer expects to receive that has no other feedback loop if it silently stops sending

None of these show up on a standard uptime check. They need their own monitoring, specifically the kind that notices an absence, a job that should have run and didn't, rather than waiting for an explicit error.

Alerting Itself Needs to Be Tested, Not Just Configured

This is the step that gets skipped most often, and it's the one that matters most. Setting up a monitor and an alert channel isn't the same as confirming the alert actually reaches you.

• Trigger a test alert deliberately before launch, don't wait for the first real incident to discover your phone was on silent, the notification permission was never granted, or the webhook URL had a typo
• Confirm alerts reach a channel you'll actually notice in the moment, not just an inbox you check twice a day
• Check notification settings on your phone specifically, a push notification that's correctly configured in the monitoring tool but silenced by your phone's own do-not-disturb settings is functionally the same as no alert at all

A monitor that's technically working but silently failing to notify anyone is worse than not having monitoring at all, because it creates false confidence that coverage exists.

Status Communication

Have this ready before launch, not built reactively during your first incident:

• A status page set up and reachable, ideally embedded on your own domain rather than requiring customers to know a separate URL
• The status page linked from somewhere customers will actually find it, a footer link, a help center article, an auto-response in your support inbox
• A rough plan for what you'd actually write during an incident, even a couple of draft phrases ready in advance beats composing customer-facing language for the first time while you're also debugging

Dependencies Outside Your Control

Not everything that can go wrong is something you built:

• Know where to check your key dependencies' own status, your hosting provider, your payment processor, your email delivery service, bookmark these before you need them, not while you're trying to figure out whether an issue is yours or theirs
• Understand what happens to your product if a specific dependency goes down, does checkout fail gracefully, or does it fail confusingly, this is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering live

This matters more in the first weeks after launch than it will later, precisely because you haven't yet built up the instinct for "this smells like a Stripe problem, not ours." That instinct comes from experience you won't have yet, so a bookmarked list of dependency status pages does the job your instincts will eventually do on their own.

Avoid a Single Point of Failure in Your Monitoring Itself

A monitoring setup that only checks from one location, or that only knows about problems your own infrastructure can detect, has its own blind spot: it can't see an outage that's specific to how customers in a different region reach you, and it won't catch third-party outages your product depends on but doesn't itself operate. Checking from multiple regions and confirming a failure from more than one location before alerting reduces both false alarms and missed real ones.

Putting the Checklist Into One Place

Everything above is a lot to track individually, uptime, SSL, DNS, ports, cron jobs, alerts, a status page, third-party dependencies. Trying to piece it together from several separate tools before launch is exactly the kind of task that gets half-finished under a launch deadline, with whichever category didn't get its own dedicated tool quietly skipped.

That's the practical case for having one tool cover as much of this list as possible rather than stitching several together: fewer signups to manage the week before launch, fewer dashboards to remember to check, and one place to confirm the whole checklist is actually covered rather than trusting that it is.

Pricing

Downdar offers three plans, each with a 30-day trial (credit card required):

Starter at $9 per month includes 10 monitors with 5-minute checks across HTTP, Ping, TCP, SSL, and DNS, plus 10 cron & heartbeat monitors, email alerts, and 1 status page.

Growth at $29 per month includes 50 monitors and 50 cron & heartbeat monitors, 1-minute checks, multiple global checkpoints, custom alert channels (Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, webhook), and 5 embeddable status pages.

Scale at $99 per month includes 250 monitors, 250 cron & heartbeat monitors, 25 status pages, and priority support with an uptime SLA.

The Bottom Line

None of the items on this checklist are individually complicated. What causes launch-week incidents usually isn't a hard technical problem, it's a gap nobody thought to cover because there was too much else going on to get to it.

Going through this list before launch, rather than discovering the gaps live, is the difference between a calm first week and a stressful one, and it's a lot easier to work through a checklist calmly the week before launch than to reconstruct it from memory while something's actively broken and customers are watching.