Overview

StatusCake is a website monitoring tool to monitor various aspects of a site: its most straightforward use is monitoring uptime via HTTP requests, but DNS, SSL, server monitoring, and others are possible. It offers a variety of ways to alert on test failures and to consolidate test results into reports.

📏 Rules

✅ Do…

• Add websites to uptime monitoring.
• Set up notifications based on each project’s needs.

🚫 Don’t…

• Be overzealous with speed test monitoring. Our current plan only allows 30 speed tests. Consider Google Lighthouse for on-the-spot checks if persistent monitoring is not necessary.

Uses & Practices

For most common applications of StatusCake (HTTP uptime), no special installation or setup is needed: simply add the new uptime test in the StatusCake control panel and fill out the appropriate fields.

Ideal Implementation

The ideal implementation for any site should meet this list. More can be done, but this is considered the minimum for a “complete” usage. Diverge from it only in exceptional cases.

A StatusCake implementation is considered complete when a site has the following:

• [ ] HTTP Uptime Test pointing at homepage (or, if available, health/status page), set at 5 minute intervals.
• [ ] Uptime Test has a Contact Group with, at minimum:
  • [ ] Contact Group sends emails to the Project Team Email
  • [ ] Contact Group sends alerts to site’s Slack channel
  • [ ] Other contacts (phone numbers, key developers, VIPs) are optional but useful.
• [ ] Speed Test set to either home page, or most important business page.
• [ ] If site relies on cron jobs, Push test to monitor crons. Push Test shares a Contact Group with Uptime Test.
• [ ] Where applicable, tests for any SSL Certificates.

Naming Convention

Include the Client Code corresponding to the site, and the full name of the site. If Cantilever (of client code CAN) owned a site called “Museum of Sherbert Artwork”, the ideal name for tests and a contact group would be would be “[CAN] Museum of Sherbert Artwork”. Or, for a contact group more broadly applicable to the Cantilever client and all their sites, “[CAN] Cantilever”.

Specifics

Monitoring

HTTP uptime tests are the bread-and-butter of StatusCake monitoring. Every site should at least have a basic HTTP uptime test that checks every 5 minutes.

Speed tests are potentially very useful, but our current plan has a limited number of them. Prioritize Core Coverage plans that call for frequent audits - the continuous data will be useful to meet that expectation.

Push, SSL, Domain, and Server tests can be added on an as-needed basis depending on the site’s hosting arrangement.

Alerting

If something goes down, we want to be informed of it.

Contact Groups