Should I host my own status monitor?

The Problem: Shared Fate

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. During incidents, co‑located monitors fail to run checks, fail to send alerts, or both.

1) Single Point of Failure

Power issues, kernel panics, noisy neighbors, host reboots, or autoscaling hiccups can take your app and your monitor down together. If the monitor is part of the blast radius, it can’t confirm anything is wrong—or tell anyone.

2) Network and DNS Coupling

VPC misconfigurations, VPN gateways, security group changes, or DNS outages can isolate your entire environment. Internal monitors stop checking and alert delivery fails because the egress path is inside the failure domain.

3) Alert Path Fragility

When email, SMS, Slack, or webhooks originate from the same infrastructure, alerts die with it. Out‑of‑band alerting ensures notifications are generated and delivered from outside the incident zone.

4) Operational Overhead

Self‑hosting means patching, scaling, backups, credential rotation, and on‑call for the monitor itself. During real incidents, you’re triaging the tool instead of the problem.

5) Compliance and Audit Gaps

Auditors expect monitoring to be independent and reliable. Separating control and data planes strengthens evidence that you’ll get alerts even when core systems fail.

What “Independent Uptime Monitoring” Looks Like

• Out‑of‑band checks: Monitoring runs from infrastructure that’s separate from your app and network.
• Diverse alert paths: Email, SMS, and chat integrations delivered from multiple regions/providers.
• Multi‑user organizations: Invite teammates, assign roles, and keep ownership clear.
• Public status pages: Share clear, accurate, externally verified uptime.

Migration Tips (Fast Wins)

• Start outside‑in: Monitor public endpoints from the public internet, not your VPC.
• Split alerting: Use at least one alert method that exits your stack (e.g., external email/SMS provider).
• Test alerts: Schedule monthly alert fire‑drills to validate paths and recipients.
• Document ownership: Assign primary/secondary responders and escalation rules.

FAQ

“Can I still run synthetic checks from inside my VPC?”
Yes—treat internal checks as supplemental. Your primary uptime signal should remain independent and externally verifiable.

“Isn’t self‑hosting cheaper?”
Once you include engineering time, patching, backups, on‑call, and incident risk, the total cost of ownership is typically higher than a hosted, independent monitor.