The complete guide

Uptime monitoring that respects you and your target.

Uptime monitoring tells you the moment a service you run stops responding. PingDog does it for the whole stack — websites, APIs, ports, DNS, TLS certificates, blockchain RPC, AI agents and MCP servers — with no account, no subscription, and a price you pay by the check.

What uptime monitoring actually is

Uptime monitoring is the practice of checking, on a schedule, whether a service is reachable and healthy — and being told the instant it is not. Instead of finding out from an angry customer that your site has been down for two hours, a monitor probes it every minute (or every five seconds) from outside your own network and raises an alert the moment a check fails.

The value is entirely in catching the failure you didn't see: an expired TLS certificate, a database that stopped accepting connections, a deploy that quietly started returning 500s, an RPC node that fell behind the chain. A good monitor turns "we had no idea" into "we knew within a minute."

Monitoring the whole stack, not just a homepage

"Is the website up?" is only the first question. PingDog runs the same probe-on-a-schedule engine against every layer you actually depend on:

CheckWhat it confirmsDetail
HTTP / HTTPSStatus code, response time, body matchWebsite & API monitoring
TCP portPort open, connect timeTCP port monitoring
DNSResolution, resolved recordsDNS monitoring
SSL certificateValidity and days to expirySSL certificate monitoring
Blockchain RPCBlock height, sync, stalenessRPC node monitoring
A2A agentAgent-card discovery + pingA2A agent monitoring
MCP serverConnect + tools/listMCP server monitoring

Why anonymous, pay-per-check monitoring wins

Traditional uptime monitors were built around accounts and subscriptions: you sign up, hand over an email and a card, pick a monthly plan, and hope you sized it right. PingDog throws all of that out.

  • No account. Your access is an opaque key — the key is the account. No sign-up, no email required, no KYC.
  • No subscription. You pay once, up front, for exactly the checks you configure, at $0.0005 each in USDC on Base. Nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel.
  • No card needed. Payment is a stablecoin, which means anyone can buy — including the many customers who have no Visa or Mastercard.
  • Nothing kept about you. No name, no location, no IP logs. Detail decays to a hashed aggregate and then to nothing, the access key included.

Read the full contrast on anonymous vs. traditional monitoring, or the head-to-head with a subscription monitor like UptimeRobot.

Proof of work you can verify

A monitoring service has a trust problem: a working-but-silent monitor and a fake one look identical — both report nothing. PingDog resolves it by selling the checking, not just the catching. Every check is counted, timestamped and charted; your dashboard headline is a live check count, uptime percentage and latency trend, never an empty screen. The delivered-check count is a verifiable, signed record you can check against our public key — the receipt for the vigilance you paid for.

Safe to point at a busy service

Because of poll-once-fan-out, no matter how many customers watch the same target, PingDog runs one probe stream and fans each result out to everyone due for it. The target sees a single probe stream regardless of customer count, so monitoring through PingDog can never become a customer-multiplied load against it. See how the mechanism works →

Ready to try it? Build a monitor — the free tier runs up to 3 monitors at a 5 minutes interval with no payment at all.