What uptime monitoring actually checks, the difference between HTTP, keyword, heartbeat and TCP checks, and how to avoid the false-positive alerts that train people to ignore the pager.
Uptime monitoring is the practice of checking, on a schedule, whether a service is responding correctly, and alerting someone when it is not. The goal is not to collect a number. It is to learn about a real problem before your customers do, without crying wolf so often that people stop listening.
The kinds of check
HTTP: request a URL and judge the response by status code and timing. The workhorse for websites and APIs.
Keyword: an HTTP check that also asserts a word is present (or absent) in the body, so a 200 that renders an error page still counts as down.
