Notes · 2026-10-17
Uptime monitoring isn't enough: monitor your funnel
Keep the ping. It is cheap and it catches a host that is actually down. It will congratulate you through the outage your customers notice.
What a ping is allowed to know
An HTTP check requests a URL and reads a status code. That answers a useful question: did this host respond? It does not click, it does not submit, and it does not see that the button's href changed from your checkout route to a hash.
Keyword checks get you a little further. The word “Pricing” on the page is not the price on the Stripe session. The word “Book” is not a Calendly event that still exists.
The failures that stay green
A deleted checkout route returns 404 only if you request that route. The homepage monitor does not. A webhook pointed at a preview URL never touches the site you are pinging. A Resend key missing in production still lets the server return the thank-you HTML.
Those are the breaks in an app assembled from a page builder, a database, and three SaaS accounts. They are independent. One of them failing does not change the status code of /.
What to run instead
Leave a fetch on the public URL. Five minutes is enough to learn that the host disappeared, and it is cheap enough to run without a browser. Add the URL a customer actually uses if it is not the homepage.
Then replay the path that makes money or collects the address. Map it once, from a sentence, on a domain you verified. Run it after deploy and on a schedule. Stop a production checkout on the payment page and read the price. Do not type a real card to find out the button works.
Tools that only ping are not wrong
URL monitors are the right tool for “is the server answering?” FunnelWatch's free plan is that tool, plus SSL expiry and a badge. The comparison pages say what we will and will not claim about other products.
The gap is the path across tools. If that path is how you get paid, a 200 on the homepage is a different question, and it deserves a different check.
Written by LitTech LLC, the company that operates FunnelWatch.