Uptime, speed, and Lighthouse across your whole fleet

Uptime alerts tell you something is wrong. They don’t tell you why.

Every monitoring tool does the same thing: send an HTTP request, check the response code, alert when the response is not 200. The alert fires. The site is down. Now what?

The Monitoring channel places uptime alerts, SSL warnings, and site health signals in the client’s operational timeline. When the alert fires at 3:12am, the timeline shows the deploy from 11pm (Code channel), the plugin update from 11:05pm (System channel), and the form submission drop that confirms the site was non-functional (Forms channel). The “now what?” is answered before the engineer opens a second tab.

The fleet’s vital signs

The dashboard opens with every monitor rolled up: average uptime and response time across the portfolio, the fleet’s Lighthouse score, broken-link count, active incidents, and certificate issues — each number carrying its delta. The Response Time Range chart draws three lines a client instantly understands: the fastest, average, and slowest response across every site you manage, day by day. The gap between those lines is operational information — your slowest site is tomorrow’s to-do list, and when the slow line drops after a performance fix, that’s a before-and-after you can put in a report.

Monitored Sites breaks the fleet down per project: uptime, average response, Lighthouse score, broken links, and a response sparkline for every site — rankable by uptime, speed, or Lighthouse depending on which question you’re answering. And because every check lands as an event, all of it flows into monthly digests and client portals automatically. That’s the quiet value engine of a maintenance retainer: uptime held, response times improved, broken links found and fixed, certificates renewed — documented every month without anyone assembling it. The work you’re already doing becomes evidence of the service you’re selling.

What the Monitoring channel captures

Uptime events: Site down, site recovered, response time degradation. Each event includes the monitoring source, affected URL, response code, and duration.

SSL signals: Certificate expiry warnings, renewal confirmations, mixed content alerts. When an SSL certificate is 14 days from expiry, the signal appears in the project timeline and the upcoming digest.

Site health: Broken link detection, DNS changes, mixed content warnings. These signals complement the traditional “is it up?” check with the operational health signals that matter for SEO and user experience.

The context advantage

A monitoring alert in isolation creates a debugging session. A monitoring alert in context creates an incident response.

Without context: 3:12am alert. Engineer wakes up. Checks the server. Checks recent deploys (opens GitHub). Checks plugin updates (opens ManageWP). Checks DNS changes (opens the registrar). 20 minutes of investigation before finding the cause.

With context: 3:12am alert appears in the Burrow timeline next to the deploy from 11pm and the caching plugin update from 11:05pm. The engineer sees the likely cause in 30 seconds. Rolls back the caching change. Service restored.

Integrations that feed this channel

• Oh Dear: Uptime monitoring, SSL checks, broken link scanning, mixed content detection
• UptimeRobot / Pingdom / StatusCake: Send monitoring events through the Burrow API
• Custom health checks: Send events from internal monitoring scripts through the API

How agencies use the Monitoring channel

Incident response: Monitoring alerts alongside deploy events, CMS changes, and form health. The “what changed?” question is answered before it’s asked.

Reliability reporting: Monthly digests include uptime percentage, incident count, and context around each incident. Clients see reliability as part of the retainer narrative.

Portfolio health: Your agency dashboard surfaces monitoring status across all client projects. Which sites are healthy? Which had incidents this week? Which SSL certificates are expiring soon?

Oh Dear integration | Site monitoring use case | Form monitoring use case