Your site just went down. Two things need to happen: you need to know about it and you need to coordinate fixing it. These are different problems, and the tools that solve them look nothing alike.
Zenduty and Vigilmon are often mentioned in the same breath when developers shop for reliability tooling — but they're solving opposite ends of the incident lifecycle. Understanding the distinction will save you from buying the wrong tool, or worse, skipping one entirely.
What Zenduty Is
Zenduty is an incident management and on-call platform. It's designed for the question: when an alert fires, who gets notified, in what order, and through which channel?
Its core features:
- On-call scheduling with rotation management, time-zone awareness, and override controls
- Escalation policies — if your primary on-call doesn't acknowledge in N minutes, page the secondary
- Alert routing rules that send different alerts to different teams
- Runbooks attached to incident types for guided response
- Post-mortem workflow and incident timeline tracking
- Stakeholder notification broadcasts during live incidents
- Integrations with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PagerDuty, and dozens of other sources
Zenduty's job begins after a problem is detected and an alert is fired. It doesn't watch your site. It routes the signal when something else detects the failure.
What Vigilmon Is
Vigilmon is an external uptime monitoring platform. It's designed for the question: is my site actually reachable by real users right now?
Its core features:
- HTTP/HTTPS endpoint monitoring from multiple geographic regions
- TCP port monitoring for databases, mail servers, and non-HTTP services
- SSL certificate expiry alerts
- Heartbeat monitoring for scheduled jobs and cron tasks
- Public and private status pages with subscriber notifications
- Webhook, Slack, and email alerts
- Multi-region consensus: alerts fire only when 3+ regional probes agree the site is down
Vigilmon's job is detection from outside your infrastructure. It doesn't assume a monitoring agent inside your systems is healthy — it probes from the internet, the same way your users would.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Vigilmon | Zenduty | |---|---|---| | HTTP/HTTPS monitoring | Yes | No (requires external monitor) | | TCP port monitoring | Yes | No | | SSL certificate alerts | Yes | No | | Multi-region consensus alerting | Yes | No | | Heartbeat/cron monitoring | Yes | No | | Status page | Yes, included | No | | On-call scheduling | No | Yes | | Escalation policies | No | Yes | | Alert routing and deduplication | No | Yes | | Runbooks | No | Yes | | Post-mortem workflow | No | Yes | | Slack/webhook alerts | Yes | Yes | | Free tier | Yes — 5 monitors | Yes — limited seats | | Paid pricing | From ~$10/month | From ~$5/user/month | | Designed for | Developer uptime detection | Team incident response |
The Core Distinction: Detection vs. Response
The most important thing to understand is this: Zenduty doesn't know if your site is down. Vigilmon doesn't know who should fix it.
They're complementary, not competing.
- Vigilmon is your detection layer. It continuously probes your endpoints from multiple global regions. When enough regions confirm a failure, it fires an alert — to a Slack channel, a webhook, or an email address.
- Zenduty is your response layer. It receives that alert and decides: who's on call, who escalates if they don't respond, what runbook guides the responder, and how stakeholders are notified.
The typical failure mode for teams that skip one of these:
- No Zenduty (only Vigilmon): Alerts fire to Slack. At 3am, nobody sees it because the Slack notification disappears into the feed. No escalation happens.
- No Vigilmon (only Zenduty): On-call schedules are perfect, but nobody generates the alert because nobody is watching the site. Zenduty routes nothing when nothing is firing.
Pricing
Zenduty
| Plan | Price | Notes | |---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 5 users, basic escalations | | Starter | ~$5/user/month | Unlimited schedules, analytics | | Growth | ~$15/user/month | Advanced rules, runbooks, SSO | | Enterprise | Custom | SLAs, dedicated support |
For a 5-person team on the Starter plan: ~$25/month — before you've added any monitoring tool to generate the alerts.
Vigilmon
| Tier | Cost | Monitors | Interval | |---|---|---|---| | Free | $0 | 5 managed / unlimited self-hosted | 1 minute | | Pro | ~$10–20/month | More monitors | 30 seconds | | Self-hosted | ~$5/month VPS | Unlimited | Configurable |
Who Should Use Zenduty
Zenduty earns its value when your team has real on-call complexity:
- Multiple engineers with different schedules. If two developers cover weekdays and one covers weekends on a rotating basis, Zenduty's scheduling handles this cleanly.
- Tiered escalation requirements. If tier-1 must acknowledge within 10 minutes or the alert escalates to tier-2 and then to management, escalation policies are the right tool.
- Multi-team alert routing. If a database alert goes to the DBA team and an API alert goes to the backend team, routing rules prevent alert fatigue and misrouting.
- Regulated post-incident documentation. If your SLAs require structured incident timelines and documented root-cause analysis, Zenduty's post-mortem workflow is built for this.
Who Should Use Vigilmon
Vigilmon is right for any team that cares whether their service is actually reachable:
- Startups and solo developers. You need to know when your site is down. Vigilmon's free tier covers this with 5 monitors at 1-minute intervals, no credit card required.
- Teams tired of false-positive alerts. Multi-region consensus means a flaky probe in one region won't page your on-call team. Only confirmed, multi-geography failures fire.
- Anyone who needs a status page. Vigilmon's public status page is included on all plans — customers can subscribe to outage updates without you manually posting to social media.
- Services with non-HTTP dependencies. TCP monitoring covers databases, mail servers, and anything that doesn't speak HTTP.
Running Both Together
For teams with real operational maturity, the stack looks like this:
- Vigilmon monitors your endpoints from multiple regions. When a real outage is confirmed, it fires a webhook.
- Zenduty receives the webhook. It pages the on-call engineer, escalates if there's no acknowledgement, attaches the relevant runbook, and notifies stakeholders.
- After resolution, Zenduty's timeline feeds directly into your post-mortem document.
This is the detection-to-response pipeline. Vigilmon handles the "is something wrong?" Zenduty handles the "what happens next?" — and Vigilmon's incident history gives your post-mortem team an accurate external timeline to work from.
Conclusion
Zenduty and Vigilmon are tools for different jobs. Zenduty is excellent at routing alerts, managing on-call schedules, and coordinating incident response. Vigilmon is excellent at detecting whether your site is actually up and notifying you when it isn't.
For early-stage teams, Vigilmon is the logical first purchase: it's free to start, generates minimal noise, and covers the core need — knowing when your service is down. Add Zenduty when your team grows large enough that on-call scheduling and escalation policies become real operational problems.
Start monitoring for free at vigilmon.online — 5 monitors, 1-minute intervals, status page, Slack integration, no credit card required.
Tags: #monitoring #devops #zenduty #uptime #oncall #sre