Uptime monitoring without a corporate IT suite
Uptime monitoring used to come from specialists — companies whose only product was monitoring. Today many of the familiar names belong to large groups that sell IT-management software of every kind, and monitoring is one module among dozens. That has advantages — one invoice, one login, one support contract — and it has costs that are easy to overlook until something goes wrong.
Your monitoring vendor is part of your attack surface
Software that watches your systems is trusted by them. The more of it that runs inside your network, the more an attacker gains by compromising its maker: supply-chain attacks through IT-management software have reached thousands of organisations at once, through routine updates their own staff installed. The larger the suite, the more of your infrastructure trusts it.
External uptime monitoring does not need any of that. To tell whether a site or an API is answering correctly, it only needs to send requests from outside, the way your users do.
How Pingsured answers it
- Nothing to install. Pingsured runs no agent, plugin or collector on your systems. Every check is an ordinary request from outside, from addresses we publish, with a User-Agent that names us and links to a page explaining what we do.
- One product. Pingsured does uptime and response monitoring and nothing else. Trusting it means trusting that one product, not a platform of other products behind it.
- A short supply chain. Your data is processed by us and a small group of EU subprocessors, and stored in the EU only.
Whatever service you use, give it only what a check needs: if an endpoint needs a login, create a dedicated read-only account for the monitor rather than reusing a person's.
Is it the right fit?
A single-product vendor is not the right choice for everyone. Pingsured watches whether your sites and APIs answer, and with what — not your servers, logs or applications from the inside. If you need one tool for all of those, a suite covers more. If uptime is what you need from it, you do not have to take the rest.
Questions to ask any monitoring vendor
- Who owns the company, and what else does the group sell?
- Does the product need software inside my network, and what can that software reach?
- How are updates to that software signed and delivered?
- Which security incidents has the vendor had, and how were customers told?
- Where do I report a vulnerability, and how quickly is it acknowledged?