This has made me realize why companies like pingdom have a business. I've always wondered, in the sense that I couldn't quite understand why you'd pay for someone just to ping things and alert you of outages (this was early in my career)

But over the last 4 years specifically I not only understand it I can't imagine not having a service like it.

Disclaimer: I don't work for pingdom and my current company doesn't use their services, I have in the past, they're pretty good, but I'm just using them as an example here