Sentry uptime monitoring and Sentry cron monitoring: what one included monitor covers, and what the rest cost

Short answer: Sentry uptime monitoring works, and for one critical URL attached to the errors you already collect it is a genuinely good deal. The catch is the allowance. Every Sentry plan, from the free Developer tier to Business at $80 a month, includes exactly one uptime monitor and one cron monitor. Additional uptime alerts are $1.00 each per month and additional cron monitors are $0.78. Sentry's fastest check interval is 60 seconds and the default threshold is three consecutive failures, so the soonest an uptime issue can open is three minutes after your site goes down.

Check a URL first ▸

every Sentry figure read from sentry.io/pricing and docs.sentry.io

alertping ▸ check preview

simulated

▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out

▸ simulation of 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN

▸ waiting…▌

If ever goes down, you get:

Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure

AlertPing app

● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.

sms · on-call

AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.

Simulation, not a measurement of your site: this preview runs entirely in your browser and the latencies are generated from the domain you typed. Real checks on your monitors run from our Frankfurt, Virginia and Singapore regions.

the allowance nobody reads

How many monitors each Sentry plan actually includes

Sentry's plan comparison is built around errors, spans, replays and logs, because that is the product. Uptime and cron monitors sit near the bottom of the same table with a quantity next to them, and the quantity is the same on every tier. Paying more for Sentry buys you more error volume, longer retention, SSO and audit logs. It does not buy you a second uptime monitor.

Sentry plan	Price	Uptime monitors	Cron monitors	Errors	Retention
Developer	$0	1	1	5,000	30 day lookback
Team	$26/mo billed annually	1	1	50,000	Up to 90 day lookback
Business	$80/mo billed annually	1	1	50,000	Up to 90 day lookback
Enterprise	Quoted	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom
Beyond the allowance	Pay as you go	+$1.00 per uptime alert	+$0.78 per monitor	Reserved or PAYG	Fixed by plan

Note that Team and Business include identical error, span, replay and log allowances. The $54 difference between them is entirely features: SSO, audit logs, advanced quota management and unlimited custom dashboards. Both numbers above are the annual-billed rate printed on Sentry's pricing page. Sentry's monthly-billed prices sit behind a toggle that is not present in the served HTML, so we are not going to quote a figure we cannot read from the source. Expect monthly billing to cost more and check the toggle yourself before you budget.

the arithmetic that decides this

What Sentry uptime monitoring costs once you watch more than one URL

Almost nobody runs one endpoint. A typical small SaaS has a marketing site, an app domain, an API root, a couple of critical API routes, a webhook receiver, a login page and a payment callback before anyone calls it thorough. Here is what that estate costs on top of your Sentry subscription, at $1.00 per uptime alert beyond the single included monitor.

Endpoints watched	Sentry add-on cost	Sentry Team total	Sentry Business total	AlertPing Starter
1	$0.00	$26.00	$80.00	$19.00
5	$4.00	$30.00	$84.00	$19.00
10	$9.00	$35.00	$89.00	$19.00
20	$19.00	$45.00	$99.00	$19.00
50	$49.00	$75.00	$129.00	$59.00 (Team)
100	$99.00	$125.00	$179.00	$59.00 (Team)

AlertPing Starter covers 20 monitors at 60-second checks, so the 50 and 100 endpoint rows move to the Team plan at $59. The Sentry columns assume the published $1.00 per additional uptime alert with one monitor included, and exclude errors, spans, replays, logs and profiling, which are metered separately on every Sentry plan.

The line worth sitting with is the 20-endpoint row. Nineteen extra uptime alerts cost $19.00 a month, which is exactly what an entire flat monitoring plan costs. Add ten cron monitors to the same estate (nine of them chargeable at $0.78) and the add-on bill becomes $26.02 a month, taking a Business account to $106.02 a month, or $1,272.24 a year. None of that replaces your Sentry subscription. It sits on top of it.

the number that is not on the pricing page

Sentry's fastest possible alert is three minutes after the outage starts

Sentry's docs give the two settings that determine this. The check interval can be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour. The failure threshold defaults to three consecutive failures before an uptime issue is created, with recovery at one consecutive success. Multiply those together and you get the earliest moment anyone can be told.

Check interval	Failures needed	Earliest alert	Share of a 99.9% monthly budget
1 minute (Sentry's fastest)	3	3 minutes	6.8%
5 minutes	3	15 minutes	34.2%
10 minutes	3	30 minutes	68.4%
20 minutes	3	60 minutes	136.9%
30 minutes	3	90 minutes	205.3%
1 hour	3	180 minutes	410.7%
30 seconds (for comparison)	3	90 seconds	3.4%

A 30.44-day month contains 43,833 minutes, so a 99.9% target allows 43.83 minutes of downtime and a 99.99% target allows 4 minutes 23 seconds. That second number is where Sentry's floor becomes a real constraint: three minutes of undetected downtime is 68% of an entire 99.99% monthly budget, spent before anyone has been notified, in a single incident. If you have signed a four-nines availability commitment with a customer, a monitor that cannot tell you sooner than three minutes is not evidence you can file against it. There is a fuller treatment of that arithmetic in our writeup on what check interval does to the uptime figure you can prove.

To be fair to Sentry, the three-failure default exists for a good reason and it is the same reason we confirm from three regions: a single failed check is very often a network blip rather than an outage, and paging a human for it destroys trust in the alert. Sentry also rotates checks across geographic locations in round-robin so consecutive failures come from different regions. The difference is not that Sentry is careless, it is that a 60-second floor multiplied by a confirmation rule lands at three minutes, and a 30-second floor lands at ninety seconds.

straight answer

Where Sentry uptime monitoring genuinely wins, and where it runs out

This is not a page arguing you should drop Sentry. Sentry is excellent at the job it was built for and we do not compete with it on that job at all. The question is narrower: should the uptime and cron features inside Sentry be the whole of your availability monitoring?

where Sentry wins

Correlation you cannot get anywhere else

An uptime failure lands next to the stack traces, spans and releases from the same minute. No external monitor can do that, because no external monitor has your error data.
Sentry auto-creates a monitor for the hostname that appears most often in your error data, so the first one configures itself.
Distributed tracing runs through the uptime check itself, so a failed check can point at the specific span that broke.
Full request control: GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, PATCH and OPTIONS, custom headers, and a request body on POST, PUT and PATCH.
If you genuinely need one monitor on one hostname, it is included at $0 even on the free Developer plan. That is a better deal than we offer, and we would rather say so.

where it runs out

Breadth, speed and the things around an outage

One included monitor per account, then $1.00 each. Breadth is the thing you pay for, and breadth is what availability monitoring is.
60 seconds is the floor, and three consecutive failures at that floor is three minutes to first alert.
HTTP only. No ICMP ping, no TCP or UDP port checks, so a database on an exposed port, an SMTP server or a game server is out of scope.
No SSL certificate expiry monitoring, which is the single most common preventable outage we see.
No public status page, so your customers still have nowhere to look and your support inbox still fills up.
No monthly uptime percentage report per endpoint, which is what an SLA review actually needs.

The pattern most teams settle into is not either/or. Sentry stays where it is, catching and triaging application errors, with its one included uptime monitor pointed at the app domain so the correlation works. A flat-priced external checker covers everything else: the marketing site, the API routes, the ports, the certificates and the scheduled jobs, at an interval short enough to defend the number in your contract, plus the status page that keeps customers from opening tickets. That is two tools doing two jobs, and it usually costs less than buying breadth by the monitor inside Sentry.

the other metered monitor

Sentry cron monitoring: the same allowance problem, with worse odds

Sentry cron monitoring watches scheduled, recurring jobs and alerts on missed runs, failures and timeouts. Your job sends a check-in when it starts and another when it finishes, and Sentry raises an issue when the expected check-in does not arrive. It is the same heartbeat model every cron monitor uses, and Sentry's implementation is well integrated with its SDKs.

The allowance is again one monitor per account, with additional monitors at $0.78 a month. That is cheaper per unit than the uptime add-on, but cron jobs are the workload where counts get large fastest. Nightly backup, hourly sync, ETL load, invoice run, dunning emails, cache warm, sitemap rebuild, certificate renewal, log rotation and a data export are ten monitors before anyone has looked at the queue workers. Nine chargeable monitors is $7.02 a month, and forty is $30.42.

The reason cron monitoring matters more than most teams assume is that a failed scheduled job produces no signal at all. A web outage announces itself: users complain, error rates spike, someone notices. A backup that silently stopped running six weeks ago announces itself on the day you need the backup. That is the entire argument for dead man's switch monitoring, and it is why we include cron heartbeats in the flat plan rather than metering them: a per-monitor price is an active incentive to leave the boring jobs unwatched, and the boring jobs are the ones that fail quietly.

the honest shortlist

Which setup fits your situation

use Sentry alone

One app, one hostname, one job

A single application with one public hostname, one scheduled job that matters and no availability commitment to anybody. The included monitors cover you at no extra cost, the correlation with your error data is genuinely useful, and adding a second tool would be overhead for its own sake. This is a real answer and it is free.

run both

A product with customers and a contract

More than a handful of endpoints, ports or certificates to watch, an uptime number you have promised someone in writing, or customers who will open tickets during an incident. Keep Sentry's included monitor on the app domain for correlation, and put the breadth, the short interval, the SSL checks and the status page on a flat plan next to it.

look elsewhere entirely

Scripted browser journeys

If your requirement is proving that a multi-step checkout completes, neither Sentry's uptime monitors nor ours will do it, because neither drives a real browser through a scripted journey. Checkly and Datadog are the honest recommendations there. Our synthetic monitoring tools comparison prices that category properly.

questions buyers actually ask

Sentry uptime monitoring: common questions

Does Sentry have uptime monitoring?

Yes. Sentry uptime monitoring is a built-in feature that continuously requests a URL you configure and opens an uptime issue when it fails. It supports GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, PATCH and OPTIONS, custom headers and a request body, and it runs checks from rotating geographic locations. Every plan, including the free Developer tier, includes one uptime monitor.

How often does Sentry check uptime?

Sentry checks on an interval you choose from 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour. One minute is the fastest option. Because an uptime issue is only created after three consecutive failures by default, the earliest you can be alerted is three minutes after the failure starts, and longer at every other interval.

How many uptime monitors does Sentry include?

One, on every plan. Developer, Team at $26 a month and Business at $80 a month all include exactly one uptime monitor and one cron monitor. Upgrading from Team to Business does not increase either allowance: it buys SSO, audit logs, unlimited dashboards and advanced quota management instead.

How much do extra Sentry uptime monitors cost?

Additional uptime alerts are $1.00 each per month on pay as you go, and additional cron monitors are $0.78. Watching 20 endpoints therefore adds $19.00 a month to your bill, and 20 endpoints plus 10 scheduled jobs adds $26.02, which is $312.24 a year on top of the Sentry subscription itself.

Does Sentry do cron monitoring?

Yes. Sentry cron monitoring tracks scheduled, recurring jobs and alerts on missed check-ins, failed runs and timeouts, using a heartbeat model where your job reports in when it starts and finishes. It is well integrated with Sentry's SDKs. One cron monitor is included per account and further monitors are $0.78 each per month.

Is Sentry uptime monitoring free?

The first monitor is included at no additional charge on every tier, including the free Developer plan, so a single URL genuinely costs nothing. Everything past the first monitor is billed at $1.00 per uptime alert per month. The feature is free in the sense that one is included, not in the sense that the capability is unmetered.

Can Sentry replace a dedicated uptime monitoring tool?

For one URL with no availability commitment, yes. For an estate, no, on three grounds: breadth is metered per monitor, the 60-second floor with a three-failure rule puts first alert at three minutes, and Sentry has no TCP or port checks, no SSL expiry monitoring, no public status page and no per-endpoint monthly uptime report.

Does Sentry monitor SSL certificate expiry?

No. Sentry's uptime checks will fail once a certificate has already expired and browsers start refusing the connection, which is too late. There is no advance expiry warning. That matters more each year as certificate lifetimes shorten, and it is the failure mode our SSL certificate monitoring comparison exists to cover.

Keep Sentry. Put the breadth somewhere it is not metered.

AlertPing watches websites, APIs, ICMP hosts, TCP and UDP ports, SSL certificates and cron heartbeats as often as every 30 seconds, confirms every failure from three independent regions before it counts as downtime, and sends SMS, email, Slack and webhook alerts on every plan. Flat pricing from $19 a month, with 30-second checks from $59, and no per-monitor add-on line anywhere on the invoice.

See pricing

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