EU-hosted uptime monitoring instead of a US service
Many uptime monitoring services are run by US companies, or store their customers' data in the US, or send it through US services for email, analytics or support. For a lot of teams that is fine. For others it is the reason a tool fails a procurement review — and it is worth knowing which group you are in before you have set up two hundred pings.
What monitoring data says about you
A monitoring account is a map of your infrastructure: hostnames and endpoints, including ones that are not linked anywhere public; request headers and credentials for the endpoints that need them; what your responses contain; and a history of every outage, with its exact times. Add the names and email addresses of the people who get the alerts, and it is data whose whereabouts you would want to know.
Where the company is based matters, not only its servers
Where data is stored is half of the question. The other half is which law applies to the company that holds it. US law can require a US company to hand over data it controls even when that data sits in a data centre in Europe, so an EU region at a US provider answers the first half and not the second.
Transfers of personal data from the EU to the US have also rested on unsteady ground. Two earlier arrangements that allowed them were struck down by the EU's highest court, in 2015 and in 2020; the one in use today dates from 2023. A setup whose legality depends on the third attempt holding is one your data protection officer may ask about.
How Pingsured answers it
- The company: Pingsured is operated by a German company and supervised by a German data protection authority. The contract is under German law.
- Storage: account data and check results are stored in the EU only, on servers in Germany and Finland.
- Subprocessors: two, both German companies — one for the platform's hosting, one for email and web hosting. There is no US service in the path of your data: not for email delivery, not for analytics, not for support chat.
- Checks outside the EU: you can check your sites from the US or Singapore. Those locations send each result back as soon as the check finishes and keep nothing.
- The paperwork: a data processing agreement is part of every contract, on every plan, and the list of subprocessors is public. A service level agreement is available on request.
Is it the right fit?
Pingsured does fewer things than the large international services — and keeps your data in the EU:
- a 30-day trial rather than a free plan;
- HTTP and ICMP checks, with certificate checks on the way;
- alerts by email, webhook and in the app, with SMS and phone calls on the way;
- monitoring and alerting only — no public status pages.
If none of those rules it out, the question that remains is where your data should live.
Questions to ask any monitoring vendor
- Which company is my contract with, and under which country's law?
- In which countries is my data stored, and in which is it processed?
- Which subprocessors handle it — including email, analytics and support tools — and where are they?
- If data leaves the EU, on what legal basis?
- Is a data processing agreement included, or only on request or on an enterprise plan?