Another day, another exciting AppSumo deal! Today it’s a Better Uptime Preview, a fairly recent deal that aims to provide a reliable uptime monitoring solution at a lifetime deal.
As usual, we will check what it does, its features and how it’s been progressing so far, if there are a good amount of reviews already and how people feel about it. We then check the price and ultimately decide whether it’s something we want to try ourselves.
To Note: With this Preview I am introducing a “Presentation” score to all our Previews (and Reviews that are also Previews), as some features are always important and part of how the tools is presented: That score is quite important as it is how I define as much as I’ve been able to find out about Roadmap, Development Pace, Documentation, and all those very important items that can make or break one’s experience once we adopt the tool in our stacks.
Onto a Better Uptime!
Unwelcoming Uptime Monitoring
Let’s face it: We are never happy when we see an e-mail/message/alarm/beeep from our Uptime Monitoring service, whatever service or website it is we monitor: it means something is not working, and that is unhappy news.
What is happy however, is having reliable uptime monitoring so you can catch unhappy news before it becomes disastrous news and your mild annoyance becomes emergency.
There are a bunch of monitoring tools already, some free, some freemium, some expensive. In my experience and for my use-case, it’s always been a bit of a miss, never really have something I am very happy with.
So that’s when Better Uptime comes in, and we’re both hopeful it can become my go-to Uptime Monitoring tool.
Let’s begin by the tool category description: Uptime Monitoring is when you set the tool to check out at a set frequency a website, web server, service, anything that is critical to your operation, and will alert you when it’s not working, so you can quickly fix whatever issue.
Beyond the basics, let’s see extra features from Better Uptime:
- Can interact with a schedule, so it will automatically contact the right people according to shifts and spreadsheets.
- Can integrate with telemetry software such as New Relic, Grafana.
- Integration with communication software such as Slack and Teams, Voice Calls, SMS.
- Integration with AWS, Google Cloud, Heroku, etc.
- Each incident seems to be verified from multiple locations to avoid false positives.
- Can Escalate incidents automatically.
- Heartbeat Monitoring.
- Status Page.
- Incident Management Built-in, or can integrate with Software for it.
Each of those features are available right now and they seem to complement well with the basic uptime need, to add flexibility where it’s needed, without being unnecessary clutter, as it’s mostly with integrations, so it depends on what your aim is: whether it is to handle your few websites or big web services, it seems it can work well for both.
That’s something I quite appreciate, and the fact that each incident is checked in 3 different locations makes it so there will be less false positives, which are… annoying, at the very least. (though welcome, because it means everything is working. But I would appreciate that if everything works, it just keeps working without notifying! Heh)
We like what we see here, so let’s move onto the AppSumo deal. Other competitors are either bad or very expensive. Often, they’re both. It’s difficult to find something that works quite well and has a price that work, so here’s hoping!
Before we move onto the deal, two important checks:
- Roadmap: Check! To note: Development seems to proceed at a fast pace, many cards have been completed over this year. Good vibes!
- Documentation: Check! Extensive documentation about their main features and integrations, well written and easy to understand.
Better Uptime Deal
Let’s use Better Uptime normal pricing as comparison
As we can see, we get the equivalent of the Team Plan and its upgrades overtime, starting at 100 monitors and 1 team member, which is similar to the base Team that goes for 80$/month. To be fair, their plans include unlimited Phone Calls, but I think that’s a plus, not the main deal.
I like how we could stack up to 5 for unlimited Monitors and Phone Calls as well, that’s just great, and it means one stack is well enough for most people handling a few websites or a web service, and if our operation is really big, we can also accomodate that with just 5 stacks, which is not a high price at all for Unlimited monitors for the life of this product.
Our Better Uptime Preview and First Impression
Normally, Uptime Monitoring tools aren’t exciting. They’re not meant to be. It should just be that alert we all dread but that should work.
However, to find the right service at a reasonable price, that’s difficult. And Better Uptime seems to be that, so we’re definitely in for a thorough Better Uptime Review, once we try it out.
Better Uptime Preview Card
Name: Better Uptime
Description: Better Uptime is an uptime monitoring service that alerts you when your site is down, with detailed incident reports.
Offer price: 49+
Currency: USD
Operating System: SaaS
Application Category: Uptime Monitoring
Summary
Better Uptime seems to have a solid foundation and extensive integrations and extra features, so as to offer a complete and reliable uptime monitoring tool, which is something most people need.
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Presentation
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Features
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Price
Overall
User Review
( votes)Pros
- Multi-location checks
- Many Integrations to Notify about Incidents
- Integrations to Telemetry Tools
- Status Page
Cons
- SMS and Call Alerts require a monthly add-on for Non-US and non-Canada users
Finally… some good fucking deal