the alertping blog
Practical writing for the people who answer for uptime. What a good uptime percentage actually is, what each extra nine costs to promise, how to set up a website monitoring tool properly, and what to tell customers while things are broken. Concrete numbers, no filler.
Comparisons
Dynatrace bills synthetics per execution: $0.001 per HTTP request and $0.0045 per browser action, multiplied by every location and every redirect. One URL checked every minute from three locations is $131.50 a month, and 50 URLs from two locations is $4,383.30.
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Comparisons
A CloudWatch canary costs $0.0012 per run, which is $52.60 a month for one URL checked every minute and about $71.93 once Lambda, logs and S3 are counted. The full rate card, costs for 5 to 100 URLs, AWS's own worked example and when a flat uptime monitor is cheaper.
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Comparisons
At 50 devices WhatsUp Gold Business lists at $1,229 a year against $645 for OpManager Professional, 1.9 times as much. Progress publishes nothing above 50 devices, so the full OpManager ladder to 1,000 devices is the number to bring to a WhatsUp Gold quote.
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Comparisons
Site24x7 licenses network components and PRTG licenses sensors, so the same 100-device network costs $1,776 a year on one and $4,296 on the other. The full ladder from 50 to 1,000 devices, the loaded case where NetFlow and config tracking close the gap, and what neither tool sees from outside your network.
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Comparisons
ManageEngine publishes the whole OpManager price list, and the base license is cheap. Here are all three editions by device pack, the per-device steps, the perpetual break-even at five years, the add-ons that triple a quote, OpManager Nexus and MSP prices, and three worked bills.
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Comparisons
Splunk publishes one On-Call price: from $5 per user a month, billed annually, for up to 10 seats. What Splunk states itself, which tier prices appear only on review sites, yearly bills for 5 to 50 users next to PagerDuty, Datadog On-Call, incident.io, Rootly and FireHydrant, and when a flat-priced uptime monitor is enough.
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Comparisons
Rootly charges $20 per user a month for each product, so a responder who also carries the pager costs $480 a year. The plan limits, the startup discount, how AI SRE is sold, Vendr purchase data and bills for 5 to 50 users next to PagerDuty, incident.io and FireHydrant.
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Comparisons
FireHydrant Pro is $25 per responder a month, billed annually only, so a 10-person on-call team pays $3,000 a year before SMS and voice. The plan limits, the per-alert Signals charge, the Freshworks ownership change and bills next to PagerDuty, incident.io and Datadog On-Call.
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Comparisons
Zabbix has no license fee, so the bill comes from Zabbix Cloud, $50 to $5,000 a month by NVPS plus storage, or a support subscription from $3,900 a year. The full tier sheet, the storage and annual billing rules, and worked bills for 50 to 500 hosts.
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Comparisons
Checkmk sells yearly subscriptions by service count, from 3,000 services for $3,300 on Pro to 30,000 for $16,500, while Cloud starts at $2,880 for 1,000. The full US dollar sheet, the edition renames, Synthetic Monitoring packs and three worked bills.
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Comparisons
Nagios XI Standard is a perpetual license from $2,595 for 100 nodes, but keeping upgrades and support costs about 80% of that every year. The full 2026 price and renewal sheet, Enterprise pricing and 1, 3 and 5-year totals per node tier.
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Comparisons
A person who runs incidents and carries the pager costs $25 a month on incident.io Team billed annually and $45 on Pro. On-call alone is $20, a dollar under PagerDuty Professional, and viewers are free on every plan.
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Comparisons
Datadog On-Call undercuts PagerDuty Professional by $1 a seat, so 15 people cost $3,600 a year against $3,780. PagerDuty Free still wins under five users, and Datadog's $40 Incident Response seat costs about twice Professional.
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Comparisons
Datadog On-Call costs $20 per seat a month on an annual plan. Here is who counts as a seat, when the $40 Incident Response bundle pays off, and what 4 to 30 person rotations cost next to PagerDuty and Splunk On-Call.
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Comparisons
For 100 devices, LogicMonitor Essentials lists $1,600 a month and PRTG $358 to $1,300, depending on sensors per device. Here is where per-device and per-sensor billing cross, the one device LogicMonitor prices lower, and the PRTG tier cliff.
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Comparisons
The main SolarWinds alternatives are LogicMonitor, Datadog, PRTG, WhatsUp Gold, New Relic and Dynatrace. We priced all of them on one virtualized estate of 25 servers, 120 VMs, 30 switches and 40 access points.
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Comparisons
The main LogicMonitor competitors are Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, SolarWinds, PRTG and WhatsUp Gold. We priced all of them on one estate of 40 servers, 20 network devices, 10 access points and 5 engineers.
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Comparisons
SolarWinds lists $8 per node a month for Observability Self-Hosted and $15.75 per node for the SaaS, on multi-year contracts billed annually. Here is every module price, how nodes and synthetic checks are counted, and what real estates pay.
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Comparisons
LogicMonitor lists $16, $27 and $53 per Hybrid Unit a month. A unit is one device or cloud instance, seven PaaS resources or five access points. Here is the full rate card, the 1,000-unit cliff and what real estates pay.
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Comparisons
WhatsUp Gold charges per device with unlimited monitors, from $1,229 a year for 50 devices. Nothing above 50 is published. Here is every edition, the perpetual math and what real networks pay.
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Comparisons
Cronitor bills $2 per monitor and $5 per user every month, with no base fee. Cheap for one person and a few jobs, linear at scale. Here is the full rate card and what real teams pay.
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Comparisons
Hyperping sells four plans from free to $299 a month. The price per monitor is low, but seats are extra and the 51st monitor moves you from $29 to $89. Here is the full rate card and what real teams pay.
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Comparisons
The old Starter, Essential and Premium ladder is gone. Uptime.com now bills 75 cents a check from 100 to 1,000 checks with no volume discount, sells status pages as a separate module, and tops out at a 1-minute interval.
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Comparisons
Superior is about 20 cents a monitor, the best per-monitor deal in the category at one minute. Reaching 30 seconds costs 3.27 times as much, SMS is a 75 or 400 credit allowance, and invoice-billed renewals need 70 days written notice.
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Comparisons
The paid price list starts at 500 sensors for $2,400 a year with nothing between it and the free tier, the device column is one assumption applied five times, and the hosted and self-hosted catalogs differ by nine dollars in total.
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Comparisons
Ping monitors are free and unlimited on every edition, but the other six monitor types meter at $0.005 a check, and locations multiply. Standard includes 10,000 checks, which covers 0.08 of one monitor running every minute from three locations.
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Comparisons
Team and Business include exactly the same errors, spans, replays, logs and monitors, so the $54 a month between them is $648 a year for SSO and audit logs. Every plan includes just one uptime monitor and one cron monitor.
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Comparisons
Checkly sells executions, not monitors. The Starter allowance covers 57% of one endpoint checked every minute, running past it costs up to 62.5% more than prepaying, and one browser journey at 1-minute frequency is $175 a month.
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Comparisons
The plan fee almost never decides the bill. Logs advertised at $0.050 a GB really cost $0.550 once write and retain are added, and one URL checked every minute from three probes is $64.80 a month.
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Comparisons
Statuspage tiers are cliffs, not slopes. Subscriber number 251 costs $840 a year, subscriber 1,001 costs $3,600, and a private page for your own staff costs 13.6 times more per person than a public one.
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Comparisons
Atlassian closed Opsgenie to new customers in June 2025 and shuts it off on April 5, 2027, deleting un-migrated data. Here is the rate card existing customers still pay, the worked bills, and what the replacement really costs.
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Comparisons
PagerDuty Professional is $21 per user a month billed annually, the free plan stops at five users, and the Business plan has been replaced by a Reliability Platform from $2,800 a year. Here is the full rate card, the $1,512 step the sixth user triggers, and what the add-ons really add.
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Comparisons
Pingdom starts at $18 a month for 10 uptime checks, and the price per check falls only slowly with volume, from $1.80 to about $1.30 at 1,000 checks. The advanced-check allowance moves against you as you grow.
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Comparisons
All three observability platforms stop at a one-minute check interval and two of them meter every execution. Here is what uptime actually costs inside each, and how to split detection from diagnosis.
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Comparisons
Splunk Observability Cloud bills a flat rate per host whatever the machine, which makes it cheap on big servers and expensive on containers. Here is every meter, the second APM product hiding on the same quote, and three worked bills against Dynatrace.
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Comparisons
Splunk AppDynamics bills per virtual CPU, not per host or per user. Here is every meter, the flat browser synthetic rate that beats Dynatrace sixteen times over, the second Splunk SKU on the same quote, and three worked bills.
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Comparisons
Dynatrace sells a consumption rate card, not plans. Here is every meter, the RAM-based trap in Full-Stack pricing, the synthetic request math, and three worked bills.
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Comparisons
New Relic bills on three meters at once: platform users, data ingest and synthetic checks. Here is the rate card, the arithmetic, three worked examples, and the free ping monitor exemption most write-ups miss.
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Comparisons
Datadog bills synthetics per test run, not per monitor, and the two test types use different denominators. Here is the arithmetic per monitor, and the point where a metered bill stops making sense.
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Guides
Your host measures its own network at its own edge. Your monitor measures what a customer gets. Both numbers can be true in the same month, and only one of them is about your website.
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Guides
Cloudflare sits between your users and your server, so it can make a broken site look healthy and a healthy site look broken. The two traps that catch teams, and the setup that closes both.
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Comparisons
Status page vendors meter completely different things: subscribers, pages, seats, or nothing at all. Here is what each one costs at US list prices, and the second subscription most buyers forget to budget for.
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Guides
Most API monitoring is set up once, points at a health endpoint, and proves almost nothing. Here is what experienced teams actually check, how often, and the practices that keep an alert trustworthy enough to wake someone up for.
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Guides
Public TLS certificates now max out at 200 days, down from 398. The ceiling falls again in 2027 and 2029. Here is the schedule, what it does to a manual renewal process, and how to get ahead of it.
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Guides
An expired certificate takes minutes to fix and hours to notice, and that ratio is the whole risk. What actually breaks, how to fix it in order, and how shrinking certificate lifetimes change renewals for good.
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Guides
You find out about an outage roughly half a check interval after it starts, so the interval you pick decides how much downtime stays hidden. How to set it per monitor instead of guessing one for everything.
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SLAs
An error budget turns a reliability target into a number you can spend: how much downtime you are allowed before you have to stop shipping features and fix reliability. Here is how to calculate and use one.
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Playbooks
A runbook is only useful if a tired engineer can follow it under pressure. Here is a template with the sections that matter, an example, and the habits that keep runbooks from going stale.
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Guides
Most outages trace back to a short list of causes: traffic surges, bad deploys, expired certificates, DNS mistakes and failing dependencies. Here is what triggers each, and how to catch it fast.
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Playbooks
A postmortem is only worth writing if the action items get done. Here is a blameless template with every section that matters, and the habits that turn a writeup into fixes that ship.
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Playbooks
A good on-call rotation is mostly about protecting people from noise: fewer false pages, clear escalation, honest handoffs, and pay for the disruption. Here is what the sustainable ones do.
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SLAs
MTTR is the clock that runs from the moment something breaks to the moment it is fixed. Here is how to calculate it, how it differs from the other MTT metrics, and the levers that shorten it.
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Guides
Heartbeat monitoring flips normal monitoring around: instead of pinging your service, it waits for your job to ping it, and alerts when the expected signal never arrives. Here is how it works and when to use it.
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Guides
The best status pages share a handful of habits: honest component health, fast incident updates, real uptime history, and plain language. Here are the patterns worth copying, with concrete examples.
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Guides
An API uptime SLA is only as good as its service credit tiers. The 10%, 25% and 50% payout thresholds, worked examples, and what separates a meaningful SLA from marketing.
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Guides
A good status page updates itself from your monitoring instead of being edited by hand in a panic. Here are the six steps to stand one up on your own domain.
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Guides
A complete uptime SLA report needs nine things, and the one teams leave out is the measurement method. Here is what belongs in one, with a worked monthly example and the arithmetic behind it.
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Guides
A service credit is the contractual remedy when a vendor misses its uptime promise: a capped, must-be-requested credit against a future invoice, not automatic cash. Here is how they actually work.
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Guides
Synthetic monitoring bills per test run, uptime monitoring runs flat. Here is what each actually costs across Datadog, Dynatrace and New Relic, and when you need one, the other, or both.
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Guides
A status page tells users whether an outage is on your side, cutting support tickets and building trust. Here is what one shows and who needs it.
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Guides
Uptime monitoring is private detection that alerts your team, while a status page is public communication that tells your customers. See how they differ and why you need both.
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Guides
Three nines means down at most about 8h 46m a year, or 43m 50s a month. Here is the downtime table, whether it is good enough, and how to measure it.
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Guides
Five nines sounds like a badge of honor, but it means a downtime budget of 26 seconds a month, and the cost of the last nine is brutal. Here is what 99.999% really means and who genuinely needs it.
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Guides
Uptime percentage is a simple formula that hides a few traps: which window you measure, what counts as down, and how your check interval limits the precision. Here is the formula and the worked examples.
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Guides
These three acronyms get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. The SLI is what you measure, the SLO is what you aim for, the SLA is what you promise. Getting the order right is the whole point.
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Guides
An alert only helps if it reaches a person. Here is how to get notified when your site goes down: external checks, second-region confirmation, and SMS or phone before email.
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Guides
An online store can return a perfect 200 while it is functionally down for buyers, so status-code monitoring gives false comfort. Here is how to watch the pages that take money and find out before customers do.
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Guides
Shopify serves the "this store is unavailable" page with a healthy 200 response, so status-code monitoring reports green while you sell nothing. Here are the 7 causes and how to fix each.
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Comparisons
Better Stack does not sell tiers, it sells a license per person who takes alerts plus an itemized menu of everything else. That is cheap for one founder and expensive for a rotation of six. The current US rate card, with the arithmetic done.
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Comparisons
UptimeRobot restructured its plans in 2026, so most pricing articles now describe a lineup that no longer exists. Here is the current US dollar rate card, plus the SMS credit meter that catches teams out.
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Comparisons
Site24x7 has a genuinely low entry price and a generous free tier, but it is one plan in a sprawling add-on-priced Zoho suite. Here is what the plans actually cost and where the bill grows.
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Guides
A job that never runs produces no error, because there is nothing to produce one. Silence looks exactly like success. A dead man's switch is the only thing that turns absence into an alert.
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Guides
A WordPress site rarely fails with a clean error. It fails with a white screen, a database message or a browser warning while the server still answers. Here are the 9 usual causes and the fix for each.
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Guides
A WooCommerce store can return a perfect 200 while the add-to-cart button is dead. Monitoring the store as one URL misses the failure that actually costs sales. Here is how to watch the paths that take money.
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Guides
An API can return 200 and still be broken: an empty list where there should be orders, a null token, a field that quietly changed type. Status-only monitoring misses all of it. Here is how to check the payload.
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Economics
Downtime cost is not one number, it is a formula: revenue lost per minute, plus payroll burn, plus recovery, plus churn. Here is the arithmetic and the costs everyone forgets.
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Guides
Cron jobs fail silently, and silence looks exactly like success. Heartbeat monitoring inverts the check: the job reports in when it works, and you get paged when it does not.
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Comparisons
Synthetic monitoring is active and runs whether or not anyone is on your site. RUM is passive and only sees what real visitors see. Here is which one you buy first, and why.
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Benchmarks
A good uptime percentage for a production web service is 99.9% or better. Here is the full nines table, what each level costs, and which target fits your product.
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SLAs
99.99% uptime allows 52 minutes 36 seconds of downtime a year, 4.38 minutes a month. Here is the downtime-cost math CTOs use to price each extra nine.
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Guides
Monitoring website uptime well takes five decisions: what to check, how often, from where, who gets alerted, and what customers see. A practical setup guide.
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Playbooks
Customers forgive downtime; they do not forgive silence. The timing rules, copy-paste status page templates and three worked outage communication examples that keep trust through an incident.
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AlertPing checks your sites, APIs and ports every 30 seconds, confirms every outage from a second region, and pages you in under 10 seconds.
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