Uptime Monitoring, Alerting, and Automation

Connor McDonald -

Uptime isn’t just a metric — it’s a core promise. Whether you’re running mission-critical applications, hosting websites for clients, or operating your own infrastructure from one of our racks, you rely on us to keep things online, fast, and secure.

But how do we do it? Behind every “99.99% uptime” badge is a complex system of monitoring, alerting, and automation designed to detect issues before they escalate — and to react within seconds when milliseconds matter.

Here’s an inside look at how we engineer uptime into everything we do.

1. Proactive monitoring & visibility across our stack

Uptime starts with visibility. You can’t fix what you don't see — so we monitor everything.

Network Infrastructure

  • All devices, including core routers, switches and edge nodes, are monitored 24/7 in real time using a range of telemetry and protocols.
  • We collect interface statistics, CPU/memory utilisation, packet loss, BGP session health, and route flaps.
  • Round-trip latency and jitter are tracked continuously across key routes, including transit and peering paths.

Hardware & Environmental

  • Power consumption per rack & individual device in the data centre
  • Facility environment monitoring (inlet temperature for each server, ambient hot-aisle temperatures, ambient cold-aisle temperatures, humidity across the points in the facility)
  • Individual server monitoring (exhaust temperature for each server, CPU temperatures, inlet temperature for each server, fan speeds, power supply & voltage status, storage disks status & SMART metrics, the chassis overall health and much more)
  • PDUs, UPS systems, and cross-connects are also monitored for load, failover state, and environmental thresholds.

Services & Application Uptime

  • HTTP(S), DNS, SMTP, and other services are externally monitored across geographically distributed nodes utilising a variety of methods
  • Synthetic checks simulate actual activity — not just pinging servers but validating full-stack functionality.

All of this data feeds into our centralised internal observability stack which encompasses a combination of internal and external tooling and monitoring sources.

2. Smart alerting and event prioritisation

Not every spike or event needs to wake up an on-call engineer at 3am on a Sunday. We use multi-tiered alerting that balances urgency, context, and impact:

  • Critical Alerts trigger immediately if a network device (such as core router or switch) goes down, rising data centre temperatures, security alert/abnormality or a cluster health check fails. These alert the on-call engineer as soon as the anomaly has been observed.
  • Warning Alerts are used for abnormal trends — BGP session drops, packet loss on a host or hypervisor, high CPU utilisation
  • Informational Events are logged but don’t trigger alarms — for example, BGP prefix changes or flap detection.

All alerts are managed as follows:

  • Escalation policies based on service type, customer impact, and severity
  • Custom alert routing (e.g., networking alerts go to the NOC, security alerts go to our SOC, colocation hardware alerts go to on-site staff)
  • Automatic alert de-duplication and silencing during planned maintenance windows

We also provide relevant alerting/visibility to key customers through ticketing and dashboard portals.

3. Automation & Self-Healing

Some issues shouldn’t need human intervention at all — and at FyfeWeb, many don’t.

Examples of automated actions we perform:

  • Loss of Upstream Connectivity
    If one of our upstream providers starts dropping packets or increases latency, we automatically reroute traffic to alternate paths or upstream providers.
  • Remote Power Cycling via IPMI or PDUs
    If a server becomes unreachable or fails health checks, we can script a graceful reboot or hard power cycle — no human intervention required.
  • Anomaly Detection and Rate Limiting
    Sudden spikes in traffic are analysed in real-time. If they match known DDoS signatures or attack vectors, we can engage rate limiting, bot protection and/or upstream scrubbing and filtering in less than 1 second.

4. Regular testing and failover drills

Uptime isn't just about reacting to problems — it's about preparing for them. We perform:

  • Quarterly failover tests between transit providers (i.e. withdrawing an upstream provider from service to simulate a failure)
  • Power redundancy tests for our UPS', generators and A+B feed failure scenarios in our colocation racks
  • Simulated NOC responses to ensure engineers can resolve priority-1 alerts within SLA

We even test alert fatigue by injecting false positives occasionally to validate our escalation workflows, ticket generation, and team readiness.

Overall, through layered observability, real-time alerting, automation, and proactive/preventative maintenance, we deliver a reliable service.

About FyfeWeb

FyfeWeb (AS212396) is a UK-based hosting and infrastructure provider focused on performance, reliability, and transparency. With points of presence in key UK data centres, diverse upstream connectivity, and growing international reach, FyfeWeb powers businesses of all sizes with dependable infrastructure and expert support. Contact us to learn more.