Ask HN: Test uptime for your API / Service? Get notified of 3rd party downtime?

As many others, I was burned by yesterday's Azure outage.

I did not have a public-facing website, but I did have some APIs and services, and services that depended on other (3rd party) services.

I wanted to know how the rest of the HN community is testing your APIs or services for uptime.

Do you have some sort of automated smoke testing on a different platform?

Do you subscribe to some service to know about 3rd party disruptions?