HTTP, ping, and keyword checks from German infrastructure. Intervals as fast as 30 seconds, every failure classified, every alert dispatched within seconds — no US cloud, no CLOUD Act, no DNS caching.
Free tier included · No credit card · Cancel anytime
Point a monitor at your service. Configure how often and how strict. Get alerted when things break.
Pick a check type — HTTP, Ping, or Keyword — and enter the URL or host you want to watch. That is the minimum configuration required. Everything else has sensible defaults.
Three ways to verify a service is alive — pick the one that matches what you are monitoring:
// every 30s from Nuremberg
GET https://api.example.com/health
→ 200 OK · 34ms · TLS 1.3
// verifies status code, response time, headers,
// SSL validity, DNS resolution, chain of trust.Once the configured number of consecutive failures is hit, an incident is opened and alerts go out via email, Slack, Discord, or webhook. The incident auto-resolves the moment the next successful check arrives — and a resolution notification is sent.
Every incident is classified with its root cause so you can triage without guessing. No generic "site down" — the alert tells you what broke.
4xx and 5xx response codes. Configurable — you decide whether a 401 is an incident or expected (e.g. for auth-gated health endpoints).
Expiry, chain-of-trust issues, hostname mismatches. Classified as its own cause so you react before an outage hits your customers.
No record found, NXDOMAIN, timeout at the resolver. No DNS caching on our side — every check performs a fresh lookup.
Server unreachable, connection hang, or response slower than your configured timeout (default 10s). Captures degraded performance, not just hard outages.
Port closed, service not listening, firewall drop. Distinct from a timeout — means the host is up but the service is dead.
Response returned 200 but the expected text is absent. Catches soft failures where a page renders an error or a WAF blocks content.
Two approaches, one goal: knowing when something breaks. Uptime catches public outages. Heartbeat catches silent internal failures.
| Uptime monitoring | Heartbeat monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | FoundersDeck pings your service | Your task pings FoundersDeck |
| Answers | "Is my service responding?" | "Did my job run on time?" |
| Best for | Websites, APIs, endpoints | Cron jobs, scripts, workers |
| Failure mode | Detects public outages | Detects silent failures |
Your API can return 200 OK while the nightly backup has silently failed for a week. Your cron job can run perfectly while your website is down. Real reliability means monitoring both directions. FoundersDeck gives you uptime monitoring and heartbeat monitoring in one tool — all hosted in Nuremberg, Germany. No CLOUD Act, no data leaving the EU, no second vendor.
The three most popular uptime tools are all US-based legal entities — meaning every byte of your monitoring data is subject to the CLOUD Act, regardless of which "region" you pick in their dashboard. Here is an honest side-by-side.
| FoundersDeck | UptimeRobot | Better Stack | Pingdom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Germany | USA | USA (Delaware) | USA (SolarWinds) |
| CLOUD Act exposure | None | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data residency | Nuremberg only | Global (US-operated) | Global (US-operated) | Global (US-operated) |
| Fastest interval | 30s (Scale) | 60s (free) | 30s | 60s |
| Monitoring locations | EU only (by design) | Global | Global | Global |
| Heartbeat / cron | ● | — | ● | — |
| Public status pages | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Paid entry tier | €9 / month | $7 / month | $29 / month | $15 / month |
You genuinely need global monitoring locations (e.g. you serve a worldwide audience and want to catch regional outages), you already operate in US compliance frameworks, or you need features that are truly category-defining like Pingdom's real-user monitoring.
Your audience is European, your buyers care about GDPR and CLOUD-Act exposure, you want uptime + heartbeat + status pages in one subscription, or you prefer a tool built by a founder who uses it to monitor his own business — not a venture-backed platform.
Every knob you need to match the monitor to the service — without drowning yourself in configuration options you don't.
30-second checks on Scale, 1-minute on Starter and Pro, 5-minute on Free.
Hard cutoff after which the check is marked as timed out. Default 10 seconds.
Number of consecutive failed checks before an incident is opened.
GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE — with custom headers, a request body, and Basic or Bearer auth. Redirects followed by default.
Default is 200 — accept a list, a range like 200-204, or a whole class like 2xx, per monitor.
30 days on Free, 90 on Starter, 180 on Pro, 365 on Scale — all stored in Germany.
Shape the exact request, assert the exact response, and watch the things around your endpoint — certificates, domains, DNS records — that quietly cause outages.
Every HTTP monitor sends the exact request you need. Choose the method — GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE — add custom headers, a request body, and Basic or Bearer authentication. Set the request timeout (default 10 seconds, up to 30) and toggle whether redirects are followed. Request configuration is available on every plan.
Tell each monitor which responses count as healthy. Enter a single code, a comma-separated list, a range like 200-204, or a class such as 2xx. Anything outside the set opens an incident classified as an HTTP error — so an auth-gated endpoint that returns 401 by design never pages you.
Every HTTPS monitor watches its TLS certificate automatically — zero configuration. FoundersDeck warns you 30, 14, 7, and 1 day before a certificate expires. Domain-expiry monitoring (Starter and up) checks your registration via RDAP and warns 30, 14, and 7 days out, so a lapsed renewal never takes your site offline.
A dedicated DNS monitor type (Starter and up) resolves A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, or NS records and compares them against the values you expect — as an exact match or a contains check. Catch hijacked records, dropped MX entries, or a propagation mistake before your email or traffic silently breaks.
Slow is not the same as down. Set a response-time threshold per monitor and any check that responds successfully but slower than that is marked degraded — still counted as available, but visible on your response-time chart and status page. You see performance eroding long before it becomes a hard outage. Available on every plan.
Alerts reach Email on every plan; Slack, Discord, and Telegram from Starter; Webhook and Microsoft Teams from Pro. Route channels per monitor, so the right team hears about the right service. For a sustained outage, reminder alerts (Starter and up) re-notify at 15, 30, 60, or 240-minute intervals until it recovers — and a recovery notification closes the loop.
On Pro and up, export typeset PDF uptime reports (monthly, quarterly, or yearly) and per-incident PDF reports, plus CSV exports of the raw check log and incident history. These give time-stamped availability evidence to support your incident-reporting documentation under § 30 BSIG (NIS2). They support your duties; they do not by themselves make you compliant.
Daily uptime rollups give every plan — including Free — a full 365-day uptime figure, viewable over 24-hour, 7-, 30-, 90-, and 365-day windows. The daily rollups are retained for two years, so year-over-year reliability trends stay available even where raw per-check logs have aged out.
Create a free account, paste a URL, and get your first alert. Five monitors, unlimited checks, no credit card.