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URL Monitoring & Uptime Checker ​

DifficultyIntermediate
Team Size2-3 people
Time~25-30 hours
Demo-ready byStep 4
PrerequisitesNode.js, basic networking, cron concepts
Built byUptimeRobot, Pingdom, Better Uptime, StatusCake

Skills you'll earn: HTTP health checks, cron scheduling, WebSocket dashboards, SSL monitoring, alerting systems

Start with pinging a URL. End with a full uptime monitoring service.

Step 1: Check if a URL is up (~1-2 hours) ​

You want to know if a website is online. Write a script that tells you.

  • A Node.js script that takes a URL as a command-line argument
  • Use fetch() or http.get() to make a request
  • Print the status code and response time
  • If the request fails or times out, print "DOWN"

You now have: A manual uptime checker.

Step 2: Check on a schedule (~2 hours) ​

You don't want to run the script by hand every five minutes.

  • Use setInterval to check the URL every N seconds
  • Log the results with timestamps to the console
  • Add support for multiple URLs from a config file (JSON or YAML)

You now have: A polling monitor.

Step 3: Store the results (~2-3 hours) ​

Your terminal scrolls away. You want to see historical data.

  • Set up a database (SQLite is fine to start)
  • Store each check: URL, status code, response time, timestamp
  • Query for uptime percentage over the last 24 hours

You now have: Persistent monitoring data.

Step 4: Build a dashboard (~3-4 hours) ​

You want to glance at a page and see what's up and what's down.

  • Create a web server with Express
  • Build a dashboard page that shows all monitored URLs
  • Green for up, red for down, with response time graphs
  • Use a charting library (Chart.js) for response time over time

You now have: A visual status page.

Step 5: Alerts (~2-3 hours) ​

Your site went down at 3 AM. You found out at 9 AM.

  • Send an alert when a URL goes from UP to DOWN
  • Start with email (Nodemailer + SMTP) or a webhook (Slack/Discord)
  • Don't spam — alert once on state change, not every failed check
  • Add a cooldown period before re-alerting

You now have: Incident notifications.

Step 6: Public status page (~3-4 hours) ​

Your users want to know if the service is down, without asking you.

  • Create a public-facing status page (no auth required)
  • Show each service with current status and 90-day uptime percentage
  • Display a timeline of incidents
  • Add an RSS feed for status updates

You now have: A status page like statuspage.io.

Step 7: Multi-region checks (~3-4 hours) ​

Your server is in India. A user in Europe says the site is slow. You see green.

  • Deploy checker agents in multiple regions (or use cloud functions)
  • Each agent reports results back to your central server
  • Dashboard shows per-region latency
  • Only alert if multiple regions report failure (avoids false positives)

You now have: Distributed monitoring.

Step 8: SSL and certificate monitoring (~2-3 hours) ​

Your SSL cert expired. The site shows a scary browser warning.

  • Check SSL certificate expiry date on each monitored URL
  • Alert when a cert is expiring within 14 days
  • Show cert details on the dashboard

Step 9: Advanced checks (~2-3 hours) ​

  • Support checking for specific response body content (keyword matching)
  • Monitor API endpoints with custom headers and POST bodies
  • Track DNS resolution time separately from HTTP response time

Step 10: Deploy (~2-3 hours) ​

  • Containerize the checker, the API, and the dashboard
  • Run the checker as a long-lived process (or cron job)
  • Set up a domain and TLS for the status page
  • Add CI/CD

Useful Resources ​

Where to go from here ​

  • Incident management (acknowledge, resolve, postmortem)
  • Synthetic monitoring (multi-step browser checks with Playwright)
  • Performance budgets (alert if response time exceeds threshold)
  • Team management and on-call rotation
  • Webhook integrations (PagerDuty, Opsgenie)