A site may appear healthy to the person who deployed it while customers cannot reach it from another network. An external monitor checks availability from outside the hosting environment.
Choose a useful check
- Monitor a public page or a lightweight health route that reflects real availability.
- Set a reasonable interval and confirm a failure with more than one attempt when appropriate.
- Route alerts to a person or team who can respond.
Avoid monitoring only the homepage if the important service is a booking or contact flow. Periodically test the alert itself and provide a status message when an outage affects customers.