Most outages aren’t dramatic — a server runs out of disk space at 3am, a certificate quietly expires, a cron job stops firing and nobody notices until a customer does. A dashboard only helps if someone’s looking at it. A push notification only helps if a phone isn’t asleep, silenced, or face down on a desk.
What to watch
Three failure types cover most of what actually wakes people up:
- Uptime: a site, API or service that stops responding.
- SSL/TLS expiry: a certificate close to running out, which breaks a site outright when it does.
- Dead man’s switch: a cron job or scheduled task that’s supposed to check in and hasn’t.
How to set it up
BreakPass doesn’t run its own uptime checks or watch your certificates — a tool you already use does that, and it sends the alert to BreakPass instead of, or alongside, its usual push notification or email.
- If you use Uptime Kuma, Healthchecks.io, Better Stack, UptimeRobot or a similar tool, add BreakPass’s webhook link as a notification target the same way you’d add Slack or email.
- If you run your own script or cron job, have it call your webhook link, or send to your BreakPass email address, when a check fails or a job doesn’t report in.
- Set an escalation: a WhatsApp message first, then a phone call if nobody acknowledges within your chosen window, then a teammate.
Tips
- Keep the WhatsApp-only tier for things that can wait until morning, and reserve calls for anything customer-facing.
- Set SSL alerts with enough lead time to actually renew — 14 and 3 days out catches most teams before it becomes urgent.
- For a small team, name a rotation in your agent’s brief rather than always alerting the same person. BreakPass delivers to whoever your agent names.
- Test the whole chain once, deliberately, before you rely on it for a real incident.
What this doesn’t replace
BreakPass isn’t a full incident-management platform. There’s no on-call schedule screen, and it doesn’t replace tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie for a large team running rotations. What it does is make sure the alert your existing monitoring tool already sends actually reaches a phone — even one that’s on silent.