While self-hosted solutions like Zabbix and Nagios offer powerful monitoring capabilities, many developers seek fully managed alternatives to avoid infrastructure maintenance. Here are robust hosted services that specialize in public endpoint monitoring:

// Sample API check configuration for UptimeRobot
{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "monitor": {
    "friendly_name": "Production API",
    "url": "https://api.example.com/health",
    "type": "http",
    "interval": 60,
    "alert_contacts": ["team@company.com"]
  }
}

For teams needing simple HTTP checks with assertions:

# Python example using StatusCake API
import requests

api_url = "https://api.statuscake.com/v1/uptime"
headers = {
  "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",
  "Content-Type": "application/json"
}

payload = {
  "name": "Checkout Service",
  "website_url": "https://store.example.com/checkout",
  "check_rate": 300,
  "confirmation": 2,
  "paused": False,
  "status_codes": "200,201,302"
}

response = requests.post(api_url, json=payload, headers=headers)
print(response.json())

• Global checkpoint locations
• Multi-protocol support (HTTP/HTTPS/WebSocket)
• Content verification capabilities
• Alerting integrations (Slack/PagerDuty/etc)
• Historical data retention

While open-source tools like Zabbix and Nagios are powerful, many developers and SREs need turnkey solutions for monitoring public-facing endpoints. The infrastructure overhead of self-hosting often outweighs the benefits for small-to-medium projects.

Here are some notable SaaS platforms that specialize in HTTP endpoint monitoring:

• UptimeRobot: Free tier available, checks every 5 minutes
• StatusCake: Advanced HTTP verification with regex matching
• Pingdom: Enterprise-grade with transaction monitoring
• Better Stack: Combines monitoring with incident management

Most providers offer API integration. Here's how to configure checks programmatically:

import requests

def create_statuscake_check():
    url = "https://api.statuscake.com/v1/uptime"
    headers = {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    payload = {
        "name": "Production API",
        "website_url": "https://api.example.com/health",
        "check_rate": 60,
        "trigger_rate": 5,
        "contact_groups": [12345],
        "required_string": "{\"status\":\"OK\"}",
        "status_codes": "200,201"
    }
    
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
    return response.json()

For mission-critical endpoints, consider these verification strategies:

1. JSON schema validation
2. Response time thresholds
3. SSL certificate expiration checks
4. DNS record verification

Most solutions offer webhook notifications. Sample Node.js webhook handler:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();

app.post('/webhook', (req, res) => {
  const { check_name, status, timestamp } = req.body;
  
  if (status === 'down') {
    // Trigger PagerDuty/Slack alert
    alertSystem.notifyCritical(${check_name} is down at ${timestamp});
  }
  
  res.status(200).end();
});