Uptime monitoring for government services

What this team needs to watch

Public services have no competitor and no opt-out: when a benefits portal or a permit form is down, residents simply cannot complete an obligation. Availability and clear public communication are the signal, often under accessibility and reporting expectations.

• Citizen forms must be checked for submission, not just rendering.
• Every public hostname needs certificate monitoring.
• A public status page gives residents and support one source of truth.

When there is no alternative for the citizen

Public services are obligations, not choices: a resident who cannot reach a benefits portal or submit a permit form has no competitor to switch to and often a deadline they cannot move. That raises the bar in two ways. First, checks must verify the action, not just the page — a content check confirming the real form loads, and where possible exercising the submission path, because a form that renders but cannot submit is a complete outage from the resident's side. Second, honest public communication matters more than usual: a public status page backed by real checks gives residents and front-line support one trustworthy source during an incident, instead of a phone line guessing. Cover every public hostname with a certificate check, since an expired certificate locks citizens out entirely.

How Sandglass covers it

Put HTTP and content checks on the citizen-facing forms and lookups, SSL certificate checks on every public hostname, and a public status page so residents and support lines have one honest source during an incident.

• Group checks by service, environment, or client so production alerts stay separate from staging noise.
• Combine HTTP, ping, TCP, content, and SSL certificate checks to match each failure mode you care about.
• Add heartbeat checks for scheduled jobs that no customer watches directly but everyone depends on.

Where teams get it wrong

Avoid measuring success by internal uptime numbers alone. A form that loads but cannot submit is down to the resident, so checks must confirm the action completes, not just that a page appears.