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Free SLA Monitoring Checklist: Weekly Rituals That Keep You Out Of Penalty Mode

3 min read
September 18, 2025
Morten PradsgaardBy Morten Pradsgaard

Step-by-step free SLA monitoring checklist covering instrumentation, alerting, reporting, and customer communication.

Free Uptime Monitor

Unlimited monitors, 1-minute checks, and the blunt breakdown of why the legacy tools feel slow. See the feature deep dive and migration checklist.

Analytics & Reports

Turn uptime data into SLAs, client reports, and long-term performance trends without bolting on another BI tool.

Smart Alerting

Ship webhook and email alerts that your team actually respects. Integrate PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack, or Discord without paying a premium.

Free SLA Monitoring Checklist Your Ops Team Should Run Every Week

SLA violations don’t happen because the contract changed. They happen because nobody checks the basics. This free SLA monitoring checklist is the weekly ritual that keeps engineering honest, customer success calm, and finance free from credit write-offs.

1. Confirm Your Monitors Still Match The Contract

  • Review SLA targets. Any new premium tier promising 99.99%? Update the monitors.
  • Ensure every critical endpoint has a production check. Compare coverage with the Free SLA Monitoring Tools rundown so gaps show up fast.
  • Validate frequency. If the SLA says five-minute response, your monitors better run more often than that.

2. Verify Alert Routing End-To-End

  • Trigger a synthetic failure on your top endpoint.
  • Confirm alerts hit Slack, email, and SMS. Use the playbooks in Free Uptime Monitor Email Alerts if notifications look stale.
  • Inspect escalation. Does the secondary on-call respond? If not, fix the rotation before legal notices.

3. Inspect Error Budgets And Incident Timelines

  • Pull uptime and latency stats from Exit1.dev dashboards. Compare them against your SLA thresholds.
  • Look at the past week’s incidents. Were response and resolution inside contract windows?
  • Update incident reports using the postmortem template kit. Share with GTM teams before customers ask.

4. Refresh Customer-Facing Surfaces

  • Check your status page copy. If it’s outdated, rewrite it now.
  • Publish timeline updates for ongoing incidents. Even “still investigating” beats silence.
  • Link to deep dives like the Free SLA Monitoring Guide when customers want to know how you track reliability.

5. Audit Integrations And Automation

  • Confirm webhooks still fire into ticketing, PagerDuty, and whatever glue code you run.
  • Test any no-code automation. If it breaks silently, your SLA is toast.
  • Review logs for failed exports. Monthly SLA reports should be on autopilot through the SLA reporting stack.

6. Share The Metrics Internally

  • Send a quick digest to leadership. Wins, risks, next steps.
  • Push uptime graphs to customer success so renewals conversations stay confident.
  • Drop takeaways in the company all-hands. Reliability is everyone’s job, not just ops.

Bonus: Quarterly Deep Clean

Beyond the weekly loop, run a deeper audit every quarter:

  • Compare tool performance using the Free SLA Monitoring Strategy guide you’re reading now.
  • Retire legacy monitors that trigger false alarms.
  • Load test failover paths so you’re not improvising during a real outage.

Run The Checklist, Keep The Credits

Free SLA monitoring thrives on discipline. This checklist keeps the discipline tight. Run it weekly, automate the evidence, and share the results. Customers stay informed, auditors stay quiet, and you stay out of the penalty box.

Morten Pradsgaard is the founder of exit1.dev — the free uptime monitor for people who actually ship. He writes no-bullshit guides on monitoring, reliability, and building software that doesn't crumble under pressure.