Why Uptime Monitoring Is Not Enough
For decades, teams have relied on uptime monitoring (ping checks) as their primary line of defense. If the server responds to a ping, the dashboard shows green. But that's often a lie.
The Problem with Traditional Uptime Monitoring
"Is the server up?" is the wrong question. The right question is: "Is the application working?" Uptime monitoring doesn't tell you about the hundreds of silent failures building up beneath the surface.
Common Silent Failures:
- Cron jobs failing to run backups
- SSL certificates expiring in 2 weeks
- Disk space at 85% and climbing
- Memory leaks gradually consuming RAM
- Database connections slowly increasing
- Log files filling disk space
- Service restart loops masking underlying issues
- Configuration drift from documented standards
Real-World Example: The Backup That Wasn't
A SaaS company discovered their nightly database backups hadn't run successfully in three weeks. Their uptime monitor showed 100% availability the entire time. When a database corruption incident occurred, they learned they had no valid backups.
What You Should Monitor Instead
Infrastructure monitoring goes beyond uptime checks to provide visibility into the signals that indicate problems before they become outages.