Site Monitoring is OpenTechnologyApp's newest built-in project template — a place to record what a public site does: when it goes down, how much traffic it's getting, and who's writing in through the contact form. It's deliberately three queues, which happens to be exactly the free-tier cap, so this is one of only two built-in templates (alongside IT Device Audit) you can install without upgrading.
What it tracks
| Queue | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Incidents | Outages and degradations — status code, downtime, severity, affected pages |
| Traffic Snapshots | Visits, unique visitors, top page, and traffic source for a period (hour/day/week/month) |
| Form Submissions | Inbound contact-form messages, with sender email and a category |
The honest part: what's automatic and what isn't
This is not a monitoring service — nothing here watches your site for you. It's a place to record signals, and today exactly one of the three queues fills itself:
| Queue | Fills how | Automatic? |
|---|---|---|
| Form Submissions | An inbound webhook from your site's contact form | Yes — this is the one live, contract-tested connection |
| Traffic Snapshots | You run or schedule a pull from your analytics provider | No — you decide the cadence |
| Incidents | You, when something actually breaks | No, by design — there's no uptime checker seeded |
If you're connecting this to the OpenTechnologyBlog contact form specifically, the wiring already exists on both sides — see SITE_MONITORING_CONNECTION.md for the ~10-minute setup. Worth knowing before you start: the form's existing email notification keeps running after you connect the webhook — you get one queue item and one email, not one replacing the other.
Everything else — traffic numbers, incident records — is manual entry unless you build your own ingest. That's not a gap waiting to be discovered; it's the template's actual, stated scope: three queues worth pointing things at, not a monitoring stack.
Two automations, three playbooks
The automations are intentionally small: a critical-severity incident jumps to urgent priority, and a resolved incident marks itself done. No escalation chains, no notification rules — those are yours to build once you're using this for real.
Three playbooks come with it:
- Outage Response — confirm from a second vantage point, record the status code and affected pages, identify the failing layer, apply or escalate the fix, record total downtime
- Weekly Traffic Review — record visits and top page for the period, compare against the previous one, note anything that moved and why
- Form Submission Triage — confirm it's not spam, route by category or reply directly, close or convert to tracked work
Get it
New Project → Site Monitoring from the template picker at opentechnologyapp.com — available on every plan including Free. Delete the five example items once you're oriented; they're there to show each queue's shape, and every one carries example.test as its site so they're easy to spot.