DigitalOcean recently announced the release of a new service called Uptime Checks, a monitoring service that checks the health of any URL or IP address. It's a simple service similar to many SaaS services currently available, the advantage is that it's a no brainer if you're already using DigitalOcean.

Setting up a check is super easy and the 1st check is free.

Click on the Monitoring menu and select the Uptime tab. Click on the Create button.

Select the type of check you want to create: HTTPS, HTTP, or Ping. Enter the Website URL and the regions you want the checks to run from. It's that simple!

The dashboard will show you the uptime, if any outages occurred, and the latency displayed in a graph.

Optionally, you can create alerts.

Here's the alert I created if a downtime has been detected for 5 minutes.

As I mentioned, you get 1 free check per account, then it's $1/month per check.

Here's a link to the documentation.

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