What should I use for monitoring API uptime and failures?

For monitoring API uptime and failures, you generally want two layers:

1. Synthetic uptime checks — hit your API from outside and verify it responds correctly.
2. APM / error monitoring — capture failures inside the app, latency, exceptions, and traces.

Good options

Simple uptime monitoring

• UptimeRobot — easy, cheap/free tier, good for basic availability checks.
• Better Uptime — uptime + incident management + status pages.
• Pingdom — solid for uptime and performance monitoring.
• StatusCake — similar all-in-one monitoring.

Deeper API failure monitoring

• Datadog — excellent if you want logs, metrics, traces, and alerts in one place.
• New Relic — strong APM and observability.
• Grafana Cloud / Prometheus + Alertmanager — great if you want more control and lower cost.
• Sentry — best for exception/error tracking, not full uptime by itself.

What I’d recommend

• If you just need to know “is my API up?”: UptimeRobot or Better Uptime
• If you need to know “why is it failing?”: Sentry + Datadog/New Relic or Sentry + Prometheus/Grafana
• If you want a simple practical setup:
  UptimeRobot for uptime + Sentry for errors

What to monitor

• Health endpoint like /health or /status
• Main API endpoints with real auth and sample requests
• Latency and error rate
• TLS/domain expiry
• Database or downstream dependency health if relevant

Alerting best practices

• Alert on 3–5 consecutive failures rather than one blip
• Use multiple locations for checks
• Separate alerts for:
  • uptime down
  • elevated latency
  • 5xx errors
  • auth/permission failures
  • dependency failures

If you tell me your stack and budget, I can recommend the best specific setup.