Website monitoring: how to get started
Updated 29 October 2026 · Læs på dansk
Monitoring a website is quick to set up, but a few choices decide whether you get useful alerts or noise. Here is the order we recommend.
1. Choose what to check
Start with the pages that earn money or build trust: the front page, login, checkout and one important inner page. Do not monitor everything at once. A few good checks beat many that get ignored.
2. Describe a correct answer
A page can answer "200 OK" and still be broken, for example an error page with the wrong status code or an empty template. So use an expected status code and, if you can, a word that must be on the page (the company name or a button). If the page redirects elsewhere, the check should follow the redirect and judge the final answer.
3. Pick an interval
Every minute is a good starting point for most sites. Faster (30 or 15 seconds) shortens the time to notice an outage but is rarely needed for an ordinary website. What matters is that the alert only fires after two failures in a row, so one lost answer does not cause a false alarm.
4. Measure from more than one place
If the check runs from only one place, a network problem there can raise an alert even though your site is fine. Measure from several places and require that most of them see the failure before it counts as downtime. That is how Tegra Uptime works.
5. Decide who gets the alert
Send the alert to an address that is read, and not to a mailbox on the server you monitor. Otherwise the message never arrives when the server is down. Consider a shared address so the alert does not depend on one person.
6. Set up a status page
Give customers a place to see whether it is you or them. See the guide on status pages.
The most common mistakes
- Alerts go to a mailbox nobody reads.
- Only the front page is monitored while login or payment is broken.
- Planned maintenance raises alerts and ruins the uptime figure. Use service windows so the time can be deducted.
- The check runs from the same network as the website and so never sees what the outside sees.
To understand the numbers afterwards, read about uptime percentage.