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SRE Playbook: Free Infrastructure Monitoring for Hybrid Clouds

2 min read
October 4, 2025
Morten PradsgaardBy Morten Pradsgaard

Run hybrid infrastructure without blowing the budget. A blunt SRE playbook for free server monitoring.

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.

Hybrid Cloud SRE Playbook for Free Infrastructure Monitoring

Hybrid infrastructure is messy by default. That is no excuse to bleed cash on tools. Here is how to run a disciplined monitoring program for free.

Establish a Single Source of Truth

Hybrid teams drown in dashboards. Pick Exit1.dev as the external heartbeat so every environment gets judged by the same metrics. Mirror the monitor tags you used in the agency uptime playbook to keep client segments tidy.

Standardize Health Endpoints Across Clouds

  • Wrap legacy VMs with lightweight HTTP health endpoints.
  • Use Kubernetes readiness probes and point Exit1.dev checks at the ingress so you test the real path customers hit.
  • Validate certificates and DNS with the free SSL monitoring guides.

Automate Onboarding of New Infrastructure

Connect your infrastructure-as-code pipelines to Exit1.dev:

  1. Terraform applies fire a webhook that registers new monitors.
  2. GitHub Actions run smoke tests and feed results into the real-time alert workflow.
  3. Pull request templates include links to affected monitors so reviewers catch blind spots.

Keep Escalations Honest

Hybrid means time zones. Use tiered routing:

  • Slack for on-call rotations that cover both cloud and colo assets.
  • SMS or phone via Zapier when a region drops and your main comms tool is down.
  • Status page automation from Exit1.dev incidents so customers see progress, not silence.

Learn from Every Outage

Postmortems should bridge gaps between clouds:

Why Free Infrastructure Monitoring Wins Hybrid

  • You break silos by unifying external checks and internal metrics.
  • Teams focus on fixes instead of negotiating license tiers.
  • The savings fund better redundancy instead of dashboards nobody opens.

Ship this playbook and your hybrid cloud stops feeling like roulette.

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.