UpDog Blog

Your uptime dashboard can be 100% green while your business is silently broken. Stripe webhooks stop arriving, orders never fulfill, and automations quietly fail — but the site still “looks up.” In this post, you’ll set up webhook monitoring the right way: monitor the endpoint for reachability, then monitor real event flow with heartbeat check-ins so you get alerted the moment the signals stop.

You’ve got an uptime monitoring tool set up and you’re staring at an empty dashboard. You know you should “add monitors”… but for what exactly? Just your homepage? Your API? Cron jobs? SSL certificates?

Uptime is part of the product for any SaaS. In this guide, you’ll set up an external uptime monitor, basic alerts, and a simple status page in about 15 minutes using a hosted tool, so you don’t have to maintain extra infrastructure.

Teams usually end up comparing Uptime Kuma vs hosted uptime monitoring for one of a few reasons: they have hit scale, they are tired of babysitting their monitoring stack, or they have had at least one incident where alerts did not go out when it mattered.

Your status monitor should be the independent witness. When it shares fate with your stack—same servers, VPC, DNS, or cloud account—it’s vulnerable to the very outages it’s meant to detect.