Free Uptime Monitoring for Serverless and Edge Functions

Serverless promised “no ops” and then delivered a new class of outages: cold starts at the worst moment, regional throttling, and mystery 429s. You don’t fix that with a polite five-minute ping. You need a free uptime monitor that treats your functions like production code, not a toy script.

Know how serverless fails

Cold starts are latency spikes, not hard downtime, until they trigger client timeouts. Throttling looks like random 429s that only show up in one region. Edge routing bugs masquerade as DNS problems. Monitor for the shape of these failures, not just 200 vs 500.

Track both the public endpoint and a private health check. The public route sees user reality; the private route (with a shared secret) tells you whether the platform is alive without cache noise. Log the response time and status for both so you can spot the drift before customers do.

Probe every region you serve

Run the Free Website Monitor from every region Exit1.dev provides. If Asia users are throttled while Europe is fine, a single probe won’t save you. Keep intervals at one minute; five-minute intervals let short outages slip through and ruin your “four nines” spreadsheet. Tie the probes to the real-time vs 5-minute monitoring guidance if you need to calm noisy teams without blinding yourself.

Alert like you mean it

Alerts belong where engineers live. Send Slack notifications through the free uptime monitor Slack integration and keep on-call rotations current. Include the request ID or traceparent header in the monitor so you can jump straight into logs. Pair with a weekly review using the free uptime monitor checklist; complacency is the real outage.

Catch cold starts before customers do

Add a warm-up synthetic that hits the edge function every few minutes and records latency. Alert on the delta, not just hard downtime. If cold starts jump from 150ms to 1s, you should know before checkout does. For vendors that offer provisioned concurrency, let the data justify turning it on instead of debating feelings.

Guardrails for platform quirks

• AWS Lambda + API Gateway: monitor the integration latency and look for creeping 429s when concurrency limits are low. Use a custom header assertion to ensure you’re not receiving the default Gateway error page.
• Cloudflare Workers: run a second probe from outside Cloudflare’s network to catch routing loops and DNSSEC footguns. Validate that KV-backed responses aren’t serving stale data after deploys.
• Vercel Edge Functions: track cache headers and the x-vercel-id to correlate failures to data center clusters. Keep a post-deploy monitor that hits preview URLs to avoid shipping broken edge middleware.

Keep evidence and learn fast

Pipe monitor results to your warehouse with the Exit1.dev CSV export so you can prove what happened during an incident. Add a public status page so customers see the same truth you do. If you’re making SLA promises, back them with the free SLA monitoring tools so reports match reality.

Serverless is brilliant, but it’s not self-healing magic. A blunt, free uptime monitor with regional probes, real alerting, and cold-start awareness keeps edge functions honest—and keeps you from apologizing in your next incident review.