Thunder Clap Uptime Monitoring

The past few months I had to take a hard look into reworking website uptime monitoring for Tinylytics — which has been working great with updown.io for some very long time now. I don't have anything against Updown, however I had some very niche edge cases that I wanted to tackle. So I've built my own that fits my own use case. I don't want to step on his toes — Adrien, the founder, has been nothing but fantastic over so many years I've used it.

Saying that, I did try and create my own internal tool some years ago which didn't work out well at all — because I didn't know much about it. But that has changed since.

So, I'm introducing Thunder Clap — my very own take on uptime monitoring.

Initially I designed it to be API first so you can hook into it from within your projects, like Tinylytics, but I've been working hard on the UI to make it work.

Monitors run for HTTP and HTTPS sites, with auto handling of OK statuses and even honouring redirects — you can also set your own expected status code also, including expected string within the response. You can set the location of the checks and if you need, set the threshold when to mark a monitor as down (for example some sites may respond as down from 3 out of 6 locations — which would trigger an email or webhook event to you). It's all quite flexible.

I want to open this up for others to try, so you can sign up and I'm including a 90 day trial to this so I can flesh it out over the school summer holiday. I may extend that though, and I am certainly in no rush.

The strength in Thunder Clap is webhooks that updates your apps with any downtime or updates, including being super easy to get started with — without having to think too much about it. I've also been super careful with marking micro outages and also general wrongly marked downtime, when in fact everything looks correct.

It also has some good documentation on the API. Have a look.

What I also found is, is that the UI is great — everything updates in real time, giving you a great overview what's happening — which actually is useful to me for Tinylytics.

For now, I am unsure about where this project goes next, and I need to build a few things out like hosted status pages — that will come. There is also pricing to figure out... so I am unsure about that right now. I'll probably do something similar as I did with Tinylytics and start low, but bring up the price as the subscriptions grow.

Anyway — I invite you to take a look, see what you think, and please share your feedback. Here for you.

✌️❤️

— Vincent