PagerDuty Uptime Monitoring: Complete Guide

PagerDuty is primarily an incident management and on-call platform, not a monitoring tool, but it's a critical part of many monitoring stacks. This guide covers how to set up comprehensive uptime monitoring for services running on or integrated with PagerDuty.

Why Monitor PagerDuty Services Externally?

Built-in monitoring tools from PagerDuty are designed to monitor their own platform's health. But your users don't care about internal metrics. They care about whether your service is accessible, fast, and working correctly. External uptime monitoring tests your service the way a real user would: from outside your infrastructure.

This outside-in perspective catches problems that internal monitoring misses: DNS issues, CDN failures, SSL certificate problems, and even platform-wide outages where the monitoring tool itself might be affected.

PagerDuty's Built-in Monitoring

PagerDuty handles alert routing, on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident response workflows. Integrates with 700+ monitoring tools. Status pages via StatusPage.io (separate product).

These capabilities are useful for understanding platform-level health, but they don't provide a complete picture of your service's availability from a user perspective.

Limitations for Uptime Monitoring

PagerDuty doesn't monitor endpoints itself. It receives alerts from monitoring tools and routes them. You still need a separate monitoring tool. Per-user pricing can be expensive for larger teams.

Setting Up External Monitoring with Warden

Warden integrates with PagerDuty as an alert destination. Warden monitors your endpoints and sends alerts to PagerDuty for routing and escalation. This gives you dedicated uptime monitoring with enterprise-grade incident management.

To get started:

1. Identify your critical endpoints — Your homepage, API health check, authentication endpoint, and key user-facing pages
2. Set check frequency — Match your SLA target. For 99.9% uptime, check every 1-2 minutes. For 99.99%, check every 10-30 seconds
3. Enable SSL monitoring — Check your certificates and set expiry alerts for 30 days in advance
4. Configure smart alerting — Use confirmation thresholds and flap detection to reduce false positives. Upgrade to Warden Cloud for multi-zone checks across regions
5. Set up alerting — Send alerts to Slack for awareness and PagerDuty for on-call escalation
6. Create a status page — Give your users visibility into service health

Best Practices

• Layer your monitoring — Use PagerDuty's built-in tools for internal metrics and Warden for external availability checks
• Monitor the full stack — Don't just check if the server responds. Verify the response contains expected content (keyword checks)
• Track your error budget — Use the error budget calculator to understand how much downtime you can afford and how fast you're consuming it
• Quantify downtime cost — Use the downtime cost calculator to build the business case for monitoring investment
• Test your alerts — Regularly verify that alerts reach the right people through the right channels
• Review and iterate — Check your monitoring setup monthly. Add new endpoints as your service grows. Tune alert thresholds to reduce noise

Join the Warden waitlist to get started with high-frequency uptime monitoring for your PagerDuty services. Self-host for free or upgrade to managed cloud with multi-zone monitoring.