updown.io alternative for more than uptime
updown.io is a deliberately tiny pay-per-check monitor that does its one job well, and Logdash is the alternative when you want logs, custom metrics and cron heartbeats for the same service instead of a credit balance and a very small dashboard.
updown.io is one of the very few tools that stayed small on purpose. Five euros buys 200,000 checks. There are no seats, no onboarding call and no upsell banner. It checks HTTP, TCP and ICMP, warns you on TLS certificate and domain expiry, runs anywhere from every 15 seconds to every hour, and confirms downtime from a second location before it wakes you up. If that list is your whole requirement, stay where you are.
People move for one reason, and it is not quality. updown.io is a single layer. It tells you the request failed and how long it took. It cannot tell you what the process was doing when it failed, because it never had that data. So the check fires, and the next thing you do is open something else.
Logdash keeps the check and the evidence together. The HTTP monitor, the application logs and the counters you register all sit under one service, so the alert and the stack trace are two seconds apart instead of two tools apart. SDKs exist for Node, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, Go, Rust and PHP. The whole thing is MIT licensed.
A health endpoint the monitor can hit
from fastapi import FastAPI, Response
from sqlalchemy import text
app = FastAPI()
# Cheap, dependency-aware, no auth. The monitor gets a status code
# and a response time, and both are worth graphing.
@app.get("/health")
async def health(response: Response):
try:
async with engine.connect() as conn:
await conn.execute(text("select 1"))
return {"status": "ok"}
except Exception:
response.status_code = 503
return {"status": "degraded"}- 1 Add the HTTP monitor Create a monitor on /health inside the service it belongs to. Status code and response time are recorded on every run, at 5 minutes on the free plan and down to 15 seconds on Pro.
- 2 Cover the jobs updown.io pulses For anything without a public URL, create a push monitor and POST to https://api.logdash.io/ping/<httpMonitorId> at the end of the job. No auth header, no body.
- 3 Add Telegram and break something Attach a Telegram channel, then stop the service or skip a cron run. The alert reaches Telegram on the next interval, and the logs from that minute are already sitting under the same service.
| Feature | Logdash | updown.io |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat, $9 or $15 a month | Pay per check, credits from 5 euros |
| Check types | HTTP and push heartbeats only | HTTP, TCP, ICMP, plus TLS and domain expiry alerts |
| Fastest check interval | 15 seconds on Pro | 15 seconds |
| Cron and background job heartbeats | Push monitors, POST to a ping URL | Pulse checks |
| Application logs from the failing service | Eight SDKs into the same service view | Not offered |
| Custom application metrics | Counters and gauges with charts | Not offered |
| Source available | MIT on GitHub | Not public, but the API is documented |
When updown.io is the better pick
- You want the smallest possible bill. Three checks every five minutes costs a few euros a year on updown.io. Paid Logdash is $9 a month whether you use it or not.
- You need TLS certificate or domain expiry alerts. Logdash checks neither, and I am not going to promise you a date for either one.
- You monitor over IPv4 and IPv6 and want them reported separately. updown.io does dual-stack checks at no extra cost. Logdash does not split the two.
- You like an interface that is almost nothing. That is a real preference and updown.io serves it better than anything else on the market.
What moving actually involves
Pull your checks out with the updown.io API, recreate them as Logdash monitors, and leave the remaining credits burning for a week while you compare. Uptime history stays behind, as it does with every vendor swap. The real work is adding the SDK to each service, and if you skip that step you have moved for nothing, because the check on its own is something updown.io already did well.
Does Logdash have a free tier?
Yes. Five monitors at a 5 minute interval, one public status page, plus logs and metrics, with no card. updown.io has no free tier but its paid usage is measured in cents.
How fast can the check interval be?
5 minutes on the free plan, 1 minute at $9 a month and 15 seconds at $15. updown.io reaches 15 seconds too, and you pay per check for it.
Does Logdash do status pages?
Yes, public status pages are on every plan, and the Pro plan serves them from a domain you own.
Can I get alerts without email?
Yes. Logdash only sends Telegram messages and webhooks. There is no email channel at all, so if you want Slack or Discord you route the webhook there yourself.