SaaS outage alerts for the tools your business runs on
30 vendors for $19 a month.
A modern company runs on dozens of SaaS products. When one fails, the effects show up somewhere else: sign-ups drop because the email provider is slow, the support team cannot see tickets, deploys stall because CI is down. People lose time figuring out what broke before they figure out it was not them.
SaaS outage alerts fix that by watching every vendor for you and telling the right people.
Step 1: Build your vendor list
Start with the services that would hurt most if they broke. Work through these categories:
- Infrastructure: cloud provider, CDN, DNS, database host
- Code and delivery: source control, CI, package registries, container registry
- Product dependencies: payments, email sending, SMS, auth, search, maps, AI models
- Internal tools: chat, video calls, email and calendar, document storage
- Customer-facing tools: help desk, live chat, CRM, status page, scheduling
- Monitoring itself: error tracking, logging, uptime monitoring
A small SaaS often lands around 15 to 30 vendors once everything is listed. An IT team supporting a whole company may have more.
Step 2: Decide who needs to know
Not every alert belongs in one channel.
- Engineering cares about infrastructure, delivery and product dependencies.
- Support cares about anything customers will notice, plus their own help desk tools.
- IT and operations care about internal tools staff use every day.
- Leadership may only want a daily digest.
Outage Clock lets you send alerts to several destinations: email addresses, Slack or Teams channels and webhooks. Pro supports up to five alert channels.
Step 3: Filter the noise
Big vendors list many components and regions. Following all of them floods the channel and people start ignoring it. Pick the components you use. If you only send transactional email through a provider, follow its sending API and ignore its marketing tools.
Use the daily digest for vendors that matter but are not urgent. Your HR software being slow can wait until morning.
Step 4: Agree what happens next
An alert is only useful if people know what to do. Write a short note for each critical vendor:
- What breaks for us if this vendor fails
- Who to tell, inside and outside the company
- Any workaround: a backup provider, a manual process, a message to post on your status page
What makes a good outage alert
- Comes from the source. Official status pages tell you what the vendor has confirmed.
- Names the component. "Stripe webhooks degraded" is actionable. "Stripe issue" is not.
- Includes the latest update text. Saves a click.
- Sends the resolution. People need to know when to stop working around it.
Outage Clock's alerts carry all four. We poll status pages every 2 to 5 minutes and add a light reachability check of our own as a second signal.
A shared view for everyone
On Pro, the private dependency status page shows every vendor you follow on one screen. Support staff can open it before escalating to engineering, which cuts down "is something going on?" messages.
Questions
What if a vendor has no status page?
Our reachability check still tells you whether its homepage or API responds. Let us know about the vendor and we will see what else is available.
Can I follow my competitors' status pages?
Technically yes, if they publish one. Most customers stick to their own dependencies.