Blog
Notes on uptime, incidents, and reliability
Long-form articles from the Uptimera team on running reliable services, writing better postmortems, and choosing the right monitoring stack.
fundamentals
7 UptimeRobot Alternatives Compared (2026)
UptimeRobot's free tier is generous but slow. The best alternatives for sub-minute checks, multi-region quorum, and better status pages, compared.
operations
Incident Severity Levels: SEV-1, SEV-2, SEV-3
What SEV-1, SEV-2, and SEV-3 mean, how to define the boundaries, who declares severity, and how the level drives paging and customer comms.
reliability
Error Budget Policy Template (with Example)
A copy-paste error budget policy: burn thresholds, what happens at each level, who decides, and how to roll it out without it becoming theater.
fundamentals
SSL vs TLS: What's the Difference? (2026)
SSL is the deprecated predecessor to TLS, yet everyone still says 'SSL certificate.' What changed, which versions are safe, and why the name stuck.
fundamentals
MTTA vs MTTR: What's the Difference?
MTTA measures time to acknowledge, MTTR time to recover. How the two differ, how to calculate each, and realistic targets for a small team.
fundamentals
What Is Uptime Monitoring? A Complete Guide
What uptime monitoring is, how multi-region checks work, what an SLA really promises, and how to pick a monitoring tool you won't outgrow.
operations
Incident Postmortem Template (Blameless & Free)
A practical, blameless postmortem template: what to include, how to run the review meeting, and the five questions that drive real learning.
reliability
99.9% vs 99.99% SLA: Downtime Math Explained
What three vs four nines means in minutes per month, why each extra nine is 10x harder, and how to pick an SLA you can actually keep.
fundamentals
MTTR, MTBF, MTTD & MTTF: Incident Metrics
The four reliability metrics every team gets asked about: what each measures, how they're calculated, and which are actually worth tracking.
fundamentals
SLA vs SLO vs SLI: A Guide for Engineers
The difference between a service level indicator, objective, and agreement, and how Google SRE teams use all three to keep reliability honest.
fundamentals
Synthetic Monitoring vs RUM: Which You Need
What synthetic checks and real user monitoring each measure, why most teams need both, and which to invest in first when budget is tight.
fundamentals
DNS Monitoring 101: Beyond the A Record
Why DNS causes 'mysterious' outages, what to monitor (records, nameservers, TTLs, DNSSEC), and how to detect propagation issues fast.
fundamentals
HTTP Status Codes During Outages: A Guide
A field guide to 5xx, 4xx, and 0 responses in production: what each code means, the difference between 502 and 504, and which to alert on.
fundamentals
TCP vs ICMP vs HTTP Checks: When to Use Each
The three primitives uptime monitors run on: what each actually tests, where they overlap, and the failure modes only one of them can catch.
operations
SSL Certificate Monitoring: Avoid Expiries
Why TLS cert expiries still take down big sites, what to monitor beyond the expiry date (chain, hostname, OCSP), and a sane warning schedule.
operations
Status Page Best Practices for Outages
What a good status page shows, what to say (and not say) during an incident, posting cadence, and the choices that build customer trust.
operations
On-Call Rotation: Set One Up Without Burnout
Shift length, primary/secondary handoffs, fair pay, and the escalation paths that separate a healthy on-call from a soul-grinding one.
operations
How to Fix Alert Fatigue Without Going Dark
Why noisy alerts erode trust faster than missed ones, the three tactics that actually cut volume, and how to audit an alert set safely.
operations
How to Monitor a REST API: 9-Point Checklist
What to check beyond '200 OK': auth-aware probes, schema validation, latency budgets, and the API failure modes most teams miss.
operations
Cron & Heartbeat Monitoring for Silent Jobs
Why a successful cron run is the loudest silence in your stack, how heartbeat monitoring works, and alerting patterns that catch missed runs.
operations
Webhook Monitoring: Catch Silent Failures
Stripe, GitHub, and Twilio retry your webhooks, then give up. How to monitor receivers like the customer-facing endpoints they really are.
operations
On-Call Runbooks: A Template Teams Will Use
Why most runbooks rot the moment they're written, what to include and exclude, and a one-page template that survives a real 3am page.
operations
Outage Email Templates Customers Respect
The four parts of a credible outage email, what to say before you know root cause, and the phrasing that keeps customers from churning.
reliability
Multi-Region Monitoring: Why Quorum Matters
Five probe regions don't help if any one can page you. Why N-of-M quorum is the biggest false-positive killer in uptime monitoring.
reliability
Error Budgets Explained (Google SRE Basics)
What an error budget is, how to set one without overthinking it, and the policies that turn 'we ran out of budget' into a real decision.
reliability
Chaos Engineering on a Small Team Budget
How to introduce controlled failure into production safely, the four experiments worth running first, and why teams overcomplicate day one.
reliability
The Five Whys: A Postmortem That Works
How to use root-cause questioning without a blame circle, plus a worked example from a credentialing bug that took down checkout.
reliability
SaaS Monitoring: The 12-Endpoint Starter Kit
The twelve URLs and surfaces every SaaS should monitor on day one, with the exact failure mode each one catches. A concrete starter list.