There are services like Textbelt that leave the trigger mechanisms all up to you and your local tools:
You bring up a good point. I think it to be less of a problem for more established companies that don't face unexpected outages too often. When we were starting out with our mobile app however this wasn't the case, and each outage meant downloads lost which were critical for getting early feedback. I see it as a bigger pain point for early founders/small teams whose server could see a lot of volatility.
So far we haven't encountered any false positives (been using it for around 6 months) but perhaps with the wrong endpoint that could be a problem. I'll keep an eye out for that.
Unless you have 1 customer who lives in the same time zone or something.
I'd understand not wanring to be being woken up from a page for a small operation though.
With that being said, I find these kinds notifications to provide more false positives than correctly detecting downtime. That ends up costing more time checking/double checking.
On the other hand, if you are running a service with no users and you have downtime... did you really have downtime?
If you run a service and you have downtime and no one reports it, did you have downtime?
I don't even check for my services. If something goes down, I'll find out via email from one or more of my customers. It happens very rarely.