ViablyViably

Know before your customers tell you

A service can be healthy in your container and still be down for the public. Viably checks the public version of your app from outside your network every hour, every two minutes after a missed check, and alerts you in the Slack channel you choose.
Trigger
Uptime
Lands in
Dashboard, with incidents in Slack
Setup
1 min
Needs
Nothing else
#ops
ViaApp3:04 AM

🚨 Checkout API is down

HTTP 504 · down 4m

Checked
https://api.example.com/health
Status
504
Open the board

Viably updates this message as the service recovers.

What this guide produces, as it appears in Slack.

Three steps, about a minute

Any public URL works, and you don't need to install or deploy anything.

Step 1Add the endpoint

Give it a name and a URL. It works for APIs, status pages, webhook receivers, and marketing sites.

Step 2Optional: Pick a channel

Choose where incidents should open, or leave it blank to report on the board only.

Step 3Watch the board fill in

Each check carries a week of six-hour bars beside its 24-hour and 7-day uptime and its median response time.

What counts as up
A 200 response is up, unless the body is JSON that says {"ok": false}. Return that when a service responds but knows it is broken. A non-JSON body is fine, as long as the status code reflects the health of the service.

What to monitor

Most teams start with the app customers use, then add the background services it depends on.

https://api.example.com/healthhttps://example.com/https://hooks.example.com/readyhttps://status.example.com/api/health

One card per outage

Each outage gets one Slack card, and Viably keeps it up to date.

Two misses, then a card

Viably ignores a single failed probe, since a deploy can cause one. It switches the endpoint to two-minute checks, and a second miss opens an incident in the channel you picked.

Edited in place

The alert is updated in place while the outage runs, and a reminder is posted in its thread every six hours. When it comes back, the recovery is written on the same message.

30 days of history

Viably keeps every probe for 30 days. The board shows uptime over 24 hours and 7 days and the median response time.

Uptime in your Monday pulse

With the power on, the Weekly Pulse includes its own 7-day uptime line.

  • Interesting endpoints rise to the top. Down right now, an incident in the last seven days, or paused with nothing being checked. Everything else stays in the count underneath.
  • Attention order. The live failure comes first, then the least reliable checks, then anything that has been quiet for a while.
  • A green week still gets a line. If nothing notable happened, the section reads All 6 endpoints up · 99.98%, weighted across the probes that actually ran.
🚦 Uptime by day
Uptime by day, from the pulse thread
The pulse posts a follow-up in its own thread with a button for each power, and Uptime by day opens the breakdown above. It follows the same 7-day window in your workspace timezone and workweek order.

Common questions

What teams ask before they turn this on.

What does a health endpoint have to return?

A 200 response. If it returns JSON, it cannot say {"ok": false}. Redirects that fail, 500s, timeouts, and empty responses all count as down.

How quickly will I know?

Viably checks a healthy endpoint once an hour. After one missed check it switches to every two minutes, and two misses in a row open an incident, so you hear within the hour and usually sooner.

Will a long outage keep pinging the channel?

No. The original alert is edited in place while the outage lasts, and a reminder is posted in that thread every six hours. When it comes back, the recovery is written on the same message.

Can I watch something that is not public?

Only if it is reachable from the public internet. Private addresses and internal hostnames are blocked.

Does every check have to alert in Slack?

No. Leave the channel empty and the check still shows on the board, without alerting anyone.

Get started

Turn on Uptime Monitoring in Powers, then add your first endpoint. Each one needs a name and a URL, plus a channel if you want Slack alerts.

Add Viably to Slack
See it in actionUptime monitoring
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