Monitoring glossary

What Is Uptime?

Learn what uptime means in website and server monitoring. Understand uptime percentages, how they are calculated, and why they matter for your business.

What Is Downtime?

Learn what downtime means, the different types (planned vs unplanned), its impact on businesses, and how to reduce it with monitoring and incident response.

What Is an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Learn what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, how uptime SLAs are structured, common SLA terms, and the difference between an SLA and an SLO.

What Is an SLO (Service Level Objective)?

Learn what a Service Level Objective (SLO) is, how it differs from an SLA, how SLOs drive error budgets, and why they matter for site reliability engineering.

What Is an Error Budget?

Learn what an error budget is, how it is calculated from your SLO, how it helps balance reliability and feature velocity, and how to use error budgets in practice.

What Is Incident Response?

Learn what incident response means in site reliability, the steps in an incident response process, and how monitoring tools enable faster detection and resolution.

What Is Heartbeat Monitoring?

Learn what heartbeat monitoring is, how it catches silent cron job failures, and why it is essential for catching background task failures that uptime checks miss.

What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

Learn what synthetic monitoring is, how it differs from real user monitoring (RUM), and when to use synthetic checks to proactively test your services.

What Is an SSL Certificate?

Learn what SSL/TLS certificates are, how they secure web traffic, the different types, and why monitoring certificate expiration prevents preventable outages.

What Is API Monitoring?

Learn what API monitoring is, why it is different from website monitoring, the key metrics to track, and how to set up effective API uptime and performance checks.

What Is a Webhook?

Learn what webhooks are, how they work, common use cases in monitoring and DevOps, and the difference between webhooks and polling.

What Is a Status Page?

Learn what a status page is, why every SaaS company needs one, the difference between public and private status pages, and how to set one up in minutes.

What Is Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)?

Learn what Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) is, how to calculate it, why reducing MTTD matters, and how monitoring tools help detect incidents faster.

What Is Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)?

Learn what Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) is, how to calculate it, the difference between MTTR and MTTD, and how incident management helps reduce resolution time.

What is Content Change Monitoring?