SLA monitoring software with SLA tracking tools and uptime SLA reporting compared
Short answer: first work out which SLA you are being held to. If your contract commits you to an availability percentage, you need uptime SLA monitoring, and Uptime.com, Site24x7, Dotcom-Monitor, AlertSite and AlertPing all produce a report you can send a customer. If your contract commits you to a response or resolution time on tickets, that is a service desk job and no uptime tool can measure it. The second thing that decides the purchase is check interval: a five-minute check cannot resolve a 99.99% target, because one missed check is longer than the entire monthly downtime budget. Eight tools are compared below on interval, reporting and real US dollar list prices.
US dollar list prices, read from each vendor
alertping ▸ check preview
simulated
▸ type a domain to watch a check and an alert play out
▸ simulation of 2 regions · US East · EU Central
▸ waiting…▌
queued
probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 2/2 regions (US East, EU Central). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 2/2 regions . First fail: EU Central.
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 US East and EU Central regions.
read this first
"SLA monitoring" means two different products
Search for SLA monitoring software and you get two categories mixed into one results page. They measure different things, they are bought by different teams, and buying the wrong one is an expensive mistake that usually surfaces at the first quarterly review. Sort this out before you look at any pricing page.
Category one
Uptime and availability SLA monitoring
Measures whether the service was actually reachable and working, from outside your network, on a schedule. It answers the question your contract asks when it says "99.9% availability measured monthly". The output is an availability percentage with the raw check history behind it.
Tools: Uptime.com, Site24x7, Dotcom-Monitor, AlertSite, Pingdom, StatusCake, UptimeRobot, AlertPing. This page compares these.
Category two
Ticket response and resolution SLA tracking
Measures how fast your team acknowledged and closed a ticket against a contractual response time. It lives inside the service desk, because only the service desk knows when the clock started, when it paused for customer input, and when the issue was resolved.
Tools: ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, Freshservice, Zendesk. We are not one of these and cannot measure a ticket SLA.
Plenty of contracts contain both kinds of commitment, and then you genuinely do need two systems: the uptime tool proves availability, the service desk proves responsiveness. Nothing on the market does both well, and any vendor claiming otherwise is usually strong at one and thin at the other. There is also a third thing called IP SLA, a Cisco router feature for measuring network path performance between devices, and it needs different software again: see IP SLA monitoring software below.
the cisco meaning
IP SLA monitoring software that reads Cisco IP SLA
IP SLA monitoring software collects the results of Cisco IP SLA operations over SNMP and alerts when latency, jitter or packet loss between two network devices crosses a threshold. The router runs the test; the software configures it, polls it and graphs it. That makes it an internal network tool, so every product that does it well runs inside your network. For per-operation prices at 10, 20 and 50 branches, see our IP SLA monitoring tool comparison.
| IP SLA monitoring tool | How it reads IP SLA | Runs | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paessler PRTG | Dedicated Cisco IP SLA sensor over SNMP: jitter, latency, packet loss | Your Windows server, or hosted | Free to 100 sensors, then $200/mo billed annually for 500 |
| ManageEngine OpManager | IP SLA monitors for WAN round-trip time and VoIP quality, configured and collected over SNMP | Your Windows or Linux server | $50 a year per IP SLA monitor, plus the base license |
| SolarWinds | IP SLA operations in its network monitoring and VoIP quality products | Your servers | Quoted |
| Zabbix | SNMP items or community templates against the Cisco IP SLA MIB | Self-hosted | Open source |
Where an external monitor fits next to IP SLA
IP SLA tells you how the path between your own devices is behaving. It cannot tell you whether a customer can reach your public service, because it never leaves your network. If the SLA you have to prove is availability of a website, API or public IP, an outside check from more than one region is the evidence, and ping and TCP port monitoring record reachability and latency to your edge as often as every 30 seconds.
Holding an ISP to its SLA
A carrier SLA usually covers availability and latency to your circuit. IP SLA measures it from your side; an independent external check measures it from the internet's side. Keeping both gives you two records that do not depend on each other when you file for a service credit, and the external one keeps recording when your own router is the device that failed.
the comparison
Eight uptime SLA monitoring tools, side by side
The reporting column is the one people skip and then regret. Almost every uptime tool shows an availability figure somewhere in its dashboard. Far fewer will export a dated, downloadable report covering a defined period, which is what an auditor or an enterprise customer actually asks for. Prices are US dollar list prices with the billing basis stated, because several vendors quote annual rates next to monthly ones.
| Tool | Fastest interval | Documented SLA report | Multi-region confirmation | Entry price (USD) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AlertPing | 30 seconds (Team plan and up), 60 seconds on entry | Yes, SLA reports on Business ($189/mo) and up | Yes, a second region confirms before alerting | $49/mo (20 monitors); $59/mo for 30-second checks | Teams who want the SLA measured and the alerting on one flat bill |
| Uptime.com | 1 minute | Yes, SLA reporting is a headline feature | Yes | $9/mo for 10 checks, $75/mo for 100; status pages extra from $13/mo | Companies that need the report to be the product, and will pay for it |
| Site24x7 | 30 seconds, but only on the $999/mo Enterprise Plus tier | Yes, a documented Availability SLA Report | Yes | Free tier (50 monitors); Web Uptime from $10/mo (1-minute) | Teams already inside the ManageEngine and Zoho ecosystem |
| Dotcom-Monitor | 1 minute | Yes, a documented SLA report with CSV and PDF export | Yes | From $19.99/mo for 10 Web Services targets at 5 min (priced per product line) | Buyers who want scheduled reports mailed out without a person doing it |
| AlertSite (SmartBear) | 1 minute | Yes, documented SLA Detail and SLA Summary reports | Yes | No public price list, quote only | Enterprises already buying SmartBear tooling |
| Pingdom | 1 minute, and that is the floor on every tier | Reporting yes, no separately documented SLA report | Yes | $18/mo monthly for 10 checks, $16.50/mo billed annually; $78/mo for 50 checks | Teams who want page speed data alongside uptime |
| StatusCake | 30 seconds on Business | Reporting yes, no separately documented SLA report | Yes | Free (10 tests, 5-minute); Superior $24.49/mo, $20.41 billed annually | Price-sensitive teams who also want SSL cover on every tier |
| UptimeRobot | 30 seconds on Team, 15 seconds on Scale | Dashboard analytics, no documented SLA report | Yes | Free (50 monitors, 5-minute, non-commercial); Solo $13/mo monthly, $12 annual | The cheapest way to watch a lot of endpoints, if nobody needs a report |
"Documented SLA report" means the vendor publishes help documentation for a named report covering a defined period. Where we say a vendor has none, we mean none is documented publicly, not that the data is unavailable. Several of these tools let you export raw check history and build the report yourself. Prices move often, so confirm before you sign.
the constraint nobody checks
Your check interval decides which SLA you can prove
An external monitor can only see the service at the moments it looks. The shortest outage it can record is one missed check, so the check interval sets the resolution of every number in your report. Compare that resolution against the monthly downtime your target actually allows and the tool shortlist narrows fast.
| Availability target | Downtime allowed per average month | Missed checks that uses up, at 5 minutes | At 60 seconds | At 30 seconds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99.0% | 7 hours 18 minutes | 88 checks | 438 checks | 877 checks |
| 99.5% | 3 hours 39 minutes | 44 checks | 219 checks | 438 checks |
| 99.9% ("three nines") | 43 minutes 50 seconds | 8 checks | 44 checks | 88 checks |
| 99.95% | 21 minutes 54 seconds | 4 checks | 22 checks | 44 checks |
| 99.99% ("four nines") | 4 minutes 23 seconds | Under 1. A single missed check blows the whole month. | 4 checks | 8 checks |
| 99.999% ("five nines") | 26 seconds | Not measurable | Not measurable | Under 1 |
What this rules out
If you have committed to 99.99%, a five-minute monitor is not evidence. Your entire monthly budget is 4 minutes 23 seconds and the tool's smallest recordable outage is five minutes, so the first blip on record already reads as a breach whether or not it was one. That single fact disqualifies most free tiers, which check every five minutes, and any paid plan that only checks every five or ten minutes.
The honest limit at the top
Nobody proves 99.999% with external polling, including us. A 26-second monthly budget is shorter than a single 30-second check interval. Teams that genuinely operate at five nines measure availability from inside the request path, using their own load balancer or application telemetry, and use external monitoring as a second opinion rather than the system of record.
Figures use an average month of 30.44 days, the convention most SLA clauses assume. An exact 30-day month is slightly stricter: 43 minutes 12 seconds at 99.9%, 4 minutes 19 seconds at 99.99%. Check which basis your contract names.
before you buy
Six things to check before you pick SLA monitoring software
01
Does it define downtime the way your contract does?
Most contracts exclude scheduled maintenance and problems outside the provider's control. If the tool cannot exclude a maintenance window from the calculation, its number will not match the number you owe your customer, and you will be reconciling two figures by hand every month.
02
How does it decide something is actually down?
A single failed request from a single location is not an outage, it is often a routing blip. Tools that confirm from several regions before recording downtime produce a higher, and more defensible, availability figure. Tools that record the first failure will understate your uptime and cost you credits you never owed.
03
Is the check deep enough to be meaningful?
A server returning 200 with an empty cart is down as far as the customer is concerned, and up as far as a naive check is concerned. Assert on something in the response body that only exists when the request really worked, or your SLA report will certify availability you did not deliver.
04
How long is the raw data kept?
A summary percentage is not evidence on its own. When a customer disputes an incident nine months later you need the individual check results behind that month's figure. Retention varies enormously by tier and it is usually shortest on exactly the cheap plans that look like good value.
05
Can the customer see it without asking?
A public status page publishing rolling uptime turns the SLA conversation from a monthly request into something already answered. It also cuts the support load during an incident. Check whether status pages are included or a separate line item, because for several vendors they are a separate subscription entirely.
06
What does the bill do when you grow?
Flat per-plan pricing bills the same in a quiet month and a busy one. Per-check and per-user pricing does not, and a faster interval multiplies a run-based bill directly. Work out the cost at the interval your SLA actually requires, not at the default the pricing page assumes.
honest shortlist
Where each one is genuinely the right answer
Including where it beats us. We would rather you buy the right tool than churn in month two.
Uptime.com, when the report is the deliverable
SLA reporting is a headline feature rather than an afterthought, and the platform carries transaction checks and real user monitoring alongside it. That breadth is real and we do not match it.
Where it loses: one minute is the fastest interval on any tier, the price climbs at 75 cents a check a month from 100 to 1,000 checks, and the customer-facing status page is a separate module from $13 a month. Full Uptime.com comparison.
Site24x7, when you already run Zoho or ManageEngine
A documented Availability SLA Report, a genuinely useful free tier at 50 monitors, and server and application monitoring in the same console. The integration story inside that ecosystem is the reason to pick it.
Where it loses: 30-second polling sits on the $999 Enterprise Plus tier, so fast checks are effectively out of reach for a small team. Full Site24x7 comparison.
Dotcom-Monitor and AlertSite, for scheduled formal reporting
Both are older, enterprise-leaning platforms built when SLA reporting was the point of buying a monitor. Dotcom-Monitor documents CSV and PDF SLA reports on a schedule; AlertSite ships SLA Detail and SLA Summary reports. If a report has to land in an inbox on the first of the month without anybody touching it, look here.
Where they lose: Dotcom-Monitor prices per product line, so covering websites and infrastructure means stacking subscriptions (the Dotcom-Monitor alternative page prices that out), and AlertSite publishes no price at all, which means a sales cycle (our AlertSite alternative page works out its credit meter instead).
UptimeRobot and StatusCake, on a tight budget
If nobody is asking you for a formal report yet and you just need to know when things break, both are cheaper than us at the entry point. StatusCake includes SSL checks on every package including the free one, which is more generous than most.
Where they lose: neither documents a formal SLA report, and UptimeRobot's free tier is non-commercial and excludes SSL monitoring. StatusCake comparison and UptimeRobot comparison.
Better Stack, when monitoring and on-call are one purchase
Monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling and logs in one platform, with a free tier at 10 monitors. If you were about to buy an alerting product separately, that bundle is worth pricing out.
Where it loses: the modular pricing makes the real monthly total hard to predict before you configure it. Better Stack comparison.
AlertPing, when the alerting matters as much as the report
30-second checks from the $59 Team plan, second-region confirmation before anything alerts, and SMS, email, Slack and webhook on every plan with no credit packs to top up. SLA reports and the full API arrive on Business at $189/mo.
Where we lose: there is no free plan, SLA reports are gated to $189, we do not do browser flow scripting or application performance monitoring, and we cannot touch a ticket SLA. How our SLA monitoring works.
questions
SLA monitoring questions
What is SLA monitoring?
SLA monitoring is the continuous measurement of a service against the targets written into a service level agreement, so that compliance can be proven rather than asserted. For an availability SLA it means checking the service on a fixed schedule from outside your network and keeping the results as evidence. For a response-time SLA it means timestamping ticket events inside a service desk.
What is SLA tracking?
SLA tracking is the same measurement viewed as a running total against the budget. Rather than reporting last month's percentage, it tells you how much of this month's allowance you have already spent. At a 99.9% target you have 43 minutes 50 seconds in an average month, so a 12-minute incident on the 4th has used a quarter of the quarter's goodwill in one morning.
What is SLA reporting?
SLA reporting is the periodic document that states the measured result against the committed target for a defined window, usually a calendar month. A useful one names the target, the measured availability, the total downtime, each incident with start and end times, any excluded maintenance, and the measurement method. Without that last item the number is not auditable.
What is the difference between SLA monitoring and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring watches a service and alerts a human when it breaks. SLA monitoring is uptime monitoring plus the record-keeping and reporting that turn those checks into contractual evidence. Every SLA monitoring tool is an uptime monitoring tool. The reverse is not true, and the gap is retention, maintenance-window handling and exportable reports.
What is an SLA monitor?
In the uptime world an SLA monitor is a single configured check, a URL, port or API endpoint, whose results roll up into an availability figure for one service. Note the name collision: on Cisco routers an SLA monitor is an IP SLA operation measuring latency and jitter between network devices. Same words, unrelated product.
How do you monitor SLA compliance?
Write down the exact commitment first, including the measurement window and the exclusions. Configure a check at an interval fine enough to resolve the allowed downtime, from more than one region so blips are not counted. Exclude your maintenance windows. Then publish the rolling figure somewhere the customer can see it, and archive the raw results for as long as the contract can be disputed.
Is there free SLA monitoring software?
There are free uptime tiers, notably Site24x7 at 50 monitors, StatusCake at 10 tests and UptimeRobot at 50 monitors for non-commercial use. None of them is really SLA monitoring, because they check every five minutes and keep short history. That is fine for a 99.5% internal target and not defensible for a customer contract.
How is SLA uptime calculated?
Availability is uptime divided by total time in the window, times 100, with agreed exclusions removed from both sides. Over a 30-day month of 43,200 minutes, 30 minutes of counted downtime gives 99.93%. The arithmetic is trivial; the arguments are always about what counted as downtime. We walk through it in how to calculate uptime percentage.
What happens if you miss an SLA target?
In most commercial contracts the remedy is a service credit, a tiered percentage of the monthly fee applied against a future invoice, and it is almost always something the customer has to claim within a deadline rather than something paid automatically. The tiers and the claim mechanics are covered in SLA service credits.
Measure the SLA you signed, and prove it
AlertPing checks your sites, APIs and ports as often as every 30 seconds, confirms every failure from a second region before it counts as downtime, and publishes rolling uptime on a status page your customers can read. SMS, email, Slack and webhook on every plan, from $49 a month.