Audit-Ready Free Website Monitoring: Evidence for SLAs, SOC2, and GDPR

Auditors don’t care about your feelings—they want timestamps, retention policies, and a story that lines up with reality. You can deliver that with a free website monitor if you run it with discipline. No need for an expensive “governance” suite when the basics are handled well.

Collect evidence by default

Turn on logging export from day one. Pipe monitor events to your warehouse using the Exit1.dev CSV export so you have an immutable trail of uptime, SSL expiry, and DNS changes. Keep a public status page and align it with the free uptime monitor checklist so every probe is documented and visible. Consistency is what auditors reward.

Prove your SLA without hand-waving

If you promise “99.9% uptime,” back it with the free SLA monitoring tools. Publish monthly reports showing calculation method, exclusion rules, and incident notes. Add links from each incident on the status page to a short postmortem—customers and auditors both want to know you learned something, not just that you reset the pager.

SOC2 and GDPR hygiene

Keep data minimal. If you don’t need payload bodies, don’t collect them. Document retention and deletion windows inside your runbook and prove it with warehouse logs. For GDPR, make sure your monitors respect regional routing; probing EU endpoints from EU regions matters when data residency is in scope. Link to your privacy stance from the status page so compliance folks see you’ve thought it through.

Incident clarity beats buzzwords

Write incident updates like you mean it: what broke, who fixed it, how to stop it from happening again. Avoid vague “resolved” notes. Add a final update that includes the deploy hash or config change. That level of detail turns a free monitor into real audit evidence.

Keep it boring and repeatable

Schedule a monthly review: rotate API keys, verify alert routes, and sample exported logs for integrity. It’s not glamorous, but boring repetition keeps you honest. The result is a monitoring stack that satisfies SLAs, earns SOC2 trust, and calms GDPR conversations—without paying for yet another enterprise tool.