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Free SLA Monitoring: How to Track Service Levels Without Paying a Dime

4 min read•
Morten PradsgaardBy Morten Pradsgaard

Blueprint for launching free SLA monitoring with uptime checks, SLO math, and executive-ready reports.

Free SLA Monitoring Is The Reliability Edge Nobody Is Charging You For

Service level agreements are promises. Break them and you owe refunds, churn, and angry emails from procurement. The catch? You do not need a pricey enterprise suite to stay ahead of every SLA. Exit1.dev ships the uptime telemetry, alerting, and reporting you need for free—if you know how to wire it together.

Start With An SLA Inventory

  1. List your obligations. Pull every SLA clause from customer contracts, internal runbooks, and partner agreements.
  2. Translate language into metrics. "99.9% uptime" becomes an allowed downtime budget of 43 minutes per month. "Sub-300ms response" becomes a latency SLO.
  3. Rank by blast radius. Map each SLA to the revenue, customer segment, or compliance risk it protects.

Turn that inventory into a spreadsheet, then plug each entry into Exit1.dev monitors. Use the Free Uptime Monitor Checklist to make sure no endpoint escapes.

Build SLA-Friendly Monitors

1. Match Monitor Frequency To Error Budgets

  • 30-second checks protect aggressive SLAs (99.95% and above).
  • 60-second checks balance noise and coverage for standard 99.9% commitments.
  • Always add a second region to confirm downtime before paging humans.

2. Monitor User Journeys, Not Just Status Codes

Combine HTTP checks with synthetic flows. Login, checkout, webhook delivery—monitor the steps customers use when they quote your SLA back to you. Steal the playbook from Website Monitoring Best Practices 2025 to stack coverage without over-complicating the setup.

3. Wire Alerts To The Teams Who Own The Promise

Calculate SLA Performance Without Spreadsheets On Fire

Exit1.dev exports raw availability data. Feed it into error budget calculations directly inside the dashboard:

  1. Set your date range to align with the SLA window (monthly, quarterly, or annual).
  2. Export downtime incidents as CSV to feed finance and customer success.
  3. Tag incidents with severity and root cause for clean postmortems.

Pair those exports with the methodology in Free Uptime Monitor vs Paid so you can defend the math when procurement challenges your numbers.

Publish SLA Dashboards Customers Actually Read

  • Host a branded status page with historical uptime graphs.
  • Add custom incident templates that call out SLA-impacting events separately from maintenance windows.
  • Embed RSS and webhook subscriptions so customers choose how they receive updates.

Link that status page on your trust center, onboarding emails, and renewal decks. Transparency protects deals before lawyers get involved.

Automate SLA Reviews

  • Schedule weekly reports that highlight uptime percentage, downtime minutes, and the percentage of error budget consumed.
  • Annotate release deployments so you can trace regressions to specific changes.
  • Archive monthly SLA summaries in Notion or Confluence for audit trails.

When performance dips, use the tactical steps in Real-Time vs 5-Minute Monitoring to tighten intervals and catch issues before the SLA breach counter starts ticking.

When To Add Paid Layers (And When Not To)

Stay free until:

  • You need compliance attestations (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001) bundled with the tool.
  • Multi-team access control requires granular permissioning beyond free tiers.
  • You want log aggregation, tracing, or RUM in the same pane of glass.

Even then, keep Exit1.dev in place as the backstop. Paid tools fail too. Redundancy is the true SLA insurance policy.

Your Next Steps

  1. Audit every SLA you already owe.
  2. Deploy Exit1.dev monitors that track the metrics those SLAs care about.
  3. Automate alerts, dashboards, and monthly reviews.
  4. Bookmark our Free SLA Monitoring Tools Roundup to compare stack options as you scale.

Free SLA monitoring isn’t a gimmick. It’s how lean teams stay out of breach territory and renew contracts without discount games. Ship the setup this week and enjoy the silence from legal next quarter.

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.