UpDog is a free and paid uptime monitoring and alerting service that tracks websites, APIs, DNS, SSL, cron jobs, ports, and more, sending instant notifications via email, SMS, Slack, and other integrations while automatically updating public status pages.
What is UpDog?
UpDog is an uptime monitoring platform that takes URLs, hostnames, or service endpoints as input and produces real-time alerts, response-time trends, and automated status pages as output. It runs as a cloud-hosted service with no self-hosted option mentioned. The service is provided by UpDog Watch (updog.watch), and offers a free plan as well as two paid tiers.
Key Features
- Website monitoring — Checks your site or API at configurable intervals (5 min on free plan, down to 1 min on BigDog) and alerts immediately on downtime.
- Response time monitoring — Tracks response latency over time and triggers alerts when trends indicate slowdowns.
- DNS monitoring — Detects unexpected DNS changes and sends alerts before propagation issues affect users.
- SSL monitoring — Provides advance expiry warnings so certificates never expire without notice.
- Cron job monitoring — Heartbeat checks for background jobs and scheduled tasks; missing check-ins trigger alerts.
- Port monitoring — Monitors critical services (DB, SMTP, custom ports) and alerts if they stop responding.
- Ping monitoring — Lightweight network availability checks for hosts and devices.
- Keyword monitoring — Detects content changes or missing text on pages to verify full health.
- Status pages — Public, brandable pages (logo, colors, custom domain) with uptime charts and incident updates.
- Integrations — Alerts route to email, SMS, PagerDuty, Slack, Splunk, Telegram, Webhooks, Discord, and Microsoft Teams.
Who should use UpDog?
- Developers and DevOps engineers — Monitor their own deployments, APIs, and background jobs to catch outages and slowdowns before they reach end users.
- Product owners and SREs — Oversee uptime across multiple services and keep stakeholders informed via public status pages with custom branding.
- Small teams and startups — Start with the free Puppy plan (3 monitors, 1 status page) and scale to larger teams with BigDog’s 50 monitors and 10 users.
What can you do with UpDog?
- Monitor a SaaS API — Set up HTTP checks at 1-minute intervals (BigDog plan) and get alerts via Slack or PagerDuty the moment the endpoint returns a non-200 status.
- Track SSL certificate expiry — Add an SSL monitor for your domain and receive email warnings 30 days before expiration (configurable intervals).
- Share a branded status page — Customize the page with your logo, colors, and custom domain (e.g., status.yourcompany.com) and automatically update it with uptime history and incident timelines.
- Monitor background cron jobs — Configure a heartbeat check that expects a ping every hour; if the job fails to check in, UpDog sends an SMS or Telegram alert.
Pricing
UpDog offers a free Puppy plan (3 monitors, 1 status page, 1 user, 5-minute check interval, email alerts). Paid plans are WatchDog at $12/month (10 monitors, 5 status pages, 3 users, 3-minute interval, email+SMS) and BigDog at $25/month (50 monitors, 10 status pages, 10 users, 1-minute interval, email+SMS). All plans include integrations with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, and Webhooks via configuration.
FAQ
Is UpDog free?
Yes, there is a free Puppy plan that includes 3 monitors, 1 status page, 1 user, and a minimum check interval of 5 minutes. Email alerts are built in; Slack, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, and Webhooks are available via configuration.
What integrations does UpDog support?
UpDog sends alerts to email, SMS, PagerDuty, Slack, Splunk, Telegram, Webhooks, Discord, and Microsoft Teams. All integrations are available on every plan, though SMS is only built into WatchDog and BigDog (not the free Puppy plan).
