Uptime monitoring for media and publishing

Q: How do you avoid a CDN hiding an origin outage?

Run at least one check against the origin directly, or assert on fresh page content, so a stale cache serving an old copy does not keep your monitoring green while the origin is down.

Q: How do I start with uptime monitoring for media and publishing?

Pick the two or three production surfaces where media teams feel an outage first, attach one check to each, and route the alerts to a single owner before expanding coverage.

Practical monitoring workflows for media teams.

Uptime monitoring for media and publishing with HTTP, ping, TCP, content, SSL certificate, and heartbeat checks, alerts, and public status pages in one Sandglass workspace.

What this team needs to watch

Publishing traffic is spiky and unforgiving: a breaking story can multiply load in minutes, and that is the worst possible time for the article pages, the CDN origin, or the ad calls to fail. The signal is whether readers can reach content under a sudden surge.

Traffic spikes around breaking news expose weak paths.
Check the origin, not only the CDN-cached response.
A content check catches a cached error page masquerading as healthy.

How Sandglass covers it

Run HTTP checks on article and section pages, content checks that confirm the body actually rendered rather than a cached error, and checks on the origin behind the CDN so a cache hiding a broken origin does not fool you.

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

A cached page can stay green while the origin is on fire. If every check rides the CDN, the first real signal of an origin failure arrives only when the cache expires.

Implementation checklist

Step 1: Map the customer-facing surfaces

List the endpoints, jobs, and components where an outage would reach the people you serve. Keep the first pass to production.

Step 2: Pick one check per failure mode

Use HTTP or content checks for web surfaces, TCP for raw ports, SSL certificate checks for HTTPS expiry, and heartbeats for scheduled work.

Step 3: Separate environments with groups

Put production, staging, and per-client checks in their own groups so routing and noise stay under control.

Step 4: Tune after the first week

Adjust intervals and retry counts once real data shows which alerts were signal and which were noise.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you avoid a CDN hiding an origin outage?

How do I start with uptime monitoring for media and publishing?

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