# Uptime monitoring service active; monitors public endpoint at least every 5 minutes; alerts on downtime

- **Pattern:** `ab-000976` (`deployment-readiness.monitoring-alerting.uptime-monitoring`)
- **Severity:** high
- **Lifecycle:** active
- **Last modified:** 2026-04-18
- **Canonical URL:** https://auditbuffet.com/patterns/ab-000976
- **License:** CC-BY-4.0 — attribute to AuditBuffet Pattern Catalog (https://auditbuffet.com/patterns/ab-000976)

## Why it matters

Without uptime monitoring, you learn about production outages from users, not from alerts. A 5-minute monitoring interval is the operational threshold between acceptable detection time and prolonged silent downtime. SOC 2 A1.1 requires availability controls; NIST SI-4 requires system monitoring. ISO 25010 reliability.availability cannot be demonstrated without instrumentation. An undetected 2-hour outage during off-hours can erase a week of user trust — monitoring configured to alert in under 5 minutes limits exposure to minutes, not hours.

## Severity rationale

High because without sub-5-minute uptime checks, production outages remain undetected until users report them, extending mean time to detection and amplifying business impact.

## Remediation

Set up Uptime Robot (free tier supports 5-minute intervals) or Datadog Synthetics for your production endpoint.

For Uptime Robot: sign up at uptimerobot.com, create a monitor for `https://your-app.com`, set the interval to 5 minutes, and add a Slack webhook or email alert channel. Document the monitoring dashboard URL in `DEPLOYMENT.md`.

For Datadog:

```yaml
# Datadog synthetic monitor (configured via UI or Terraform)
resource "datadog_synthetics_test" "uptime" {
  name    = "Production uptime"
  type    = "api"
  subtype = "http"
  request_definition {
    method = "GET"
    url    = "https://your-app.com/api/health"
  }
  locations = ["aws:us-east-1"]
  options_list {
    tick_every = 300  # 5 minutes
  }
}
```

Alert to a Slack channel tied to your on-call rotation.

## Detection

- **ID:** `uptime-monitoring`
- **Severity:** `high`
- **What to look for:** Enumerate every relevant item. Look for monitoring service integration: Pingdom, Uptime Robot, Datadog Synthetics, AWS CloudWatch, or New Relic. Check configuration files, documentation, or code for references to monitoring endpoints. Verify monitoring interval is at most 5 minutes.
- **Pass criteria:** An uptime monitoring service is configured and actively monitoring the production endpoint with a frequency of 5 minutes or less. Alerts are sent to the team (Slack, email, PagerDuty) on downtime.
- **Fail criteria:** No uptime monitoring service is configured, or monitoring is configured but not actively running, or monitoring interval exceeds 5 minutes.
- **Skip (N/A) when:** The project is not planned for production, or is API-only with no public HTTP endpoint.
- **Detail on fail:** `"No uptime monitoring service detected. Production endpoint is not monitored for availability."` or `"Uptime Robot configured but monitoring only every 30 minutes — exceeds 5 minute SLA."` or `"No alert destination configured for downtime notifications."`
- **Remediation:** Set up uptime monitoring. Using Uptime Robot (free tier available):

  1. Sign up at uptime.robot
  2. Add a monitor for your production endpoint: `https://your-app.com`
  3. Set check interval to 5 minutes
  4. Add notification channels (Slack webhook, email)
  5. Document the monitoring dashboard URL in your DEPLOYMENT.md

  Or use Datadog:

  ```yaml
  # datadog.yml or via Datadog UI
  monitors:
    - name: Uptime Check
      type: uptime
      query: "http.request.https://your-app.com/health"
      threshold: 5m
      alert_to: slack_channel
  ```

## External references

- iso-25010 reliability.availability
- nist SI-4
- soc2 A1.1

Taxons: observability

HTML version: https://auditbuffet.com/patterns/ab-000976