The status, and the content
You give a page and a piece of text that must appear on it: “Add to basket”, “Sign in”, your product’s name. If it disappears, that is an outage — even on a 200.
Your page answers 200. The “Pay” button is gone.
A classic monitor looks at the status code. The most expensive outage answers 200 with an empty page, a broken template, or a button that has been missing since Thursday’s deploy. Here you say what the page must contain — and we check both.
One alert when it breaks, one when it returns
Never in between: an outage that lasts does not produce one email a minute. The return tells you how long it went on.
Slow is not down
A page taking four seconds shows on the screen, in orange. It wakes nobody up: it is not an emergency, it is information.
What it costs to set up
A domain, a path, a piece of text. Nothing to install on your server: we call your page like a visitor would, from outside.
What it does not do
No client-side JavaScript execution: we read the HTML as it is served. A single-page app that is empty on load should be checked on its API, not on its screen.
With the other modules
The page sits on a domain of the project. Watch knows when its certificate expires, Stats sees whether traffic fell at the same moment. It is all one house.