Small businesses that rely on IT infrastructure are incredibly vulnerable to IT failure. According to Infrascale research, 51% of small businesses suffered losses of $10,000 to $40,000 due to IT downtime. While most of the downtime lasted for less than 30 minutes, it lowered customer satisfaction or retention and employee productivity significantly. 

Monitoring software can help solve this problem, but small businesses rarely have the budget for it. When the IT budget is less than $100 a month, IT alerting software can come in handy.   

Reducing downtime with IT alerting software  

IT alerting software sends real-time notifications to the IT team when a website or application is down. The software notifies system administrators via email and SMS as well as via other internal communications software through API integration. Comprehensive solutions can also provide root cause analysis to determine why the system is down, saving system administrators time to run diagnostics. 

According to G2 reviewers, below are the top five software solutions based on return on investment (ROI) period that primarily serve small businesses. 

G2 reviewers rank IT alerting software based on ROI 

ROI period is measured by the number of months it takes to make money back after purchasing a software solution. Reasonably priced software will generate enough value for its users within a short period of time. A low ROI period ensures that the buyers have earned back the amount they invested, which is an important factor for businesses with limited IT budgets.

• With 94% of the reviewers from the small business segment, Better Uptime is the most liked solution in the IT alerting space. It is a website monitoring solution that tracks web pages, API, PING, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, or generic network monitoring. It also offers incident management capability and external status update pages for customers. This type of solution is ideal for companies that rely heavily on their website for day-to-day operations.  
• With 69% of the reviewers from the small business segment, AlertOps is a solution that has earned high customer satisfaction. It is an alerting solution that can be integrated with IT infrastructure or industry-specific software to alert the operations team on a variety of incidents. This tool is best suited for customers in vertical industries such as healthcare or education. 
• With 67% of reviews from users, Freshstatus is a popular tool used by organizations for IT alerting. It is software that provides dedicated status updates for both internal and external parties via a custom status alert page, social media sites, and various other integrations. This solution is a great fit for businesses with a strong customer focus. 
• For small companies that run their infrastructure on AWS, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a software that offers a highly customizable message delivery service. It batch delivers error messages, status updates, and other notifications with manual setup. However, this software requires a decent amount of technical expertise on AWS, so it should only be ideal for businesses that have at least one dedicated AWS administrator. 
• Lastly, StatusCast is an incident management software that comes with a status page feature. This solution has comprehensive incident management that requires no coding experience to integrate with other software applications for alerting and monitoring purposes. This type of tool fits companies that don’t have sufficient IT resources. 

Efficiently tackling downtime within a budget

Instead of going for the solutions that are the cheapest or even free, companies should consider different use cases for their IT operations. The list above shows that almost every product has a distinct focus, even though all of them have IT alerting capability built in. 

The IT stack complexity has increased as companies moved from on-premises, legacy software to SaaS. Technical administrators and engineers now only have a short period of time to fix issues across the application portfolio to avoid extended downtime. In order to detect and fix unplanned outages, companies must purchase a suitable IT alerting system so they are can prevent revenue loss from extended downtime.

Edited by Sinchana Mistry