Tell me when a client site is down — and when someone quietly changed it

We are four people looking after 43 sites we mostly did not build. Two things keep going wrong, and we learn about both of them from someone else.

The first is that a site goes down. A certificate expires, a host runs out of disk, a plugin update takes the checkout with it. The client notices, calls us, and by then it has been down long enough for them to have counted the hours.

The second is quieter and worse. Somebody with edit access changes a page — a price, a phone number, a legal line we wrote with a lawyer — and nobody tells us. We find it weeks later, by accident, usually while looking for something else.

What we actually need

• An availability check per site: is it answering, is it answering fast, is the certificate about to expire.
• A change check per page: what is on this page that was not here yesterday.
• One alert stream for both. We do not want to run two tools and reconcile them.
• A way to mute the noise — the parts of a page that change on every load and mean nothing.

Why it matters

Both failures cost us the same thing, which is the client's belief that we are watching. A site that was down for six hours on a Sunday is a refund conversation. A price that was wrong for three weeks because someone edited it and did not say is a harder one, because we are the people who were supposed to notice.

What we do today

A free uptime pinger that emails one address, and nothing at all for changes except memory. When a client asks "did this always say that?", the honest answer is that we do not know.