SolarWinds Uptime Monitoring: Complete Guide

SolarWinds offers multiple monitoring products including Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and Pingdom for uptime monitoring. This guide covers how to set up comprehensive uptime monitoring for services running on or integrated with SolarWinds.

Why Monitor SolarWinds Services Externally?

Built-in monitoring tools from SolarWinds 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.

SolarWinds's Built-in Monitoring

SolarWinds SAM monitors applications and servers. Pingdom (SolarWinds) provides external uptime monitoring. SolarWinds Observability SaaS combines multiple monitoring capabilities.

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

Multiple overlapping products can be confusing. Enterprise-focused pricing. Pingdom has per-monitor limits. On-premises products require Windows servers. The 2020 supply chain incident raised security concerns.

Setting Up External Monitoring with Warden

Warden provides transparent, open-source uptime monitoring as an alternative to SolarWinds' proprietary tools. Multi-region monitoring, 10-second checks, and unlimited monitors without the complexity of the SolarWinds product portfolio.

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 SolarWinds'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 SolarWinds services. Self-host for free or upgrade to managed cloud with multi-zone monitoring.