<b>Q: How do I know my monitoring itself hasn't silently died?</b>

<b>Q: How do I know my monitoring itself hasn't silently died?</b>

A: Great instinct, because a monitor that quietly stops checking gives you a fake all-clear, which is worse than no monitoring at all. You think you're covered; you're not.

Three safeguards:
— Pick a provider that runs from multiple independent regions, so one node going dark doesn't blind you.
— Watch for the alert you should get on schedule. If your daily heartbeat or weekly report stops arriving, that's a signal the monitor itself is down.
— For high-stakes setups, run a second, independent monitor from a different vendor. They watch each other.

This is also why "no alerts" should never feel reassuring on its own. Confirm you're actually receiving the routine, expected pings, not just the absence of bad news.

Follow-up: test your alert path monthly by triggering a real (planned) failure. Delivery breaks silently too.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.