Air Miles Achieves Proactive Monitoring and Peace of Mind with Uptime.com
Introduction
For more than 30 years, Air Miles has been a trusted name in coalition loyalty programs in The Netherlands. Air Miles enables members to collect and redeem points across a wide network of brands.
As CTO, Erik Voorink is responsible for ensuring that the systems behind this ecosystem run smoothly. Air Miles operates with a SaaS-first architecture built on platforms such as Annex Cloud, SAP Public Cloud, Microsoft Fabric, and Microsoft-hosted infrastructure. With reliability being paramount, Erik turned to Uptime.com to strengthen visibility and reduce risk across this complex environment.
From Reactive Alerts to Proactive Monitoring
When Erik joined Air Miles, monitoring was minimal and largely reactive. There were default alerts in Microsoft Application Insights, but they were basic.
“We didn’t really do any monitoring,” Erik said. “If something broke, we would have one of our partners call us and say, ‘Hey guys, are you down?’”
In a previous role, Erik had implemented deep monitoring across hundreds of virtual machines, catching issues before failures occurred. But Air Miles operates as a SaaS-first company without a team of system engineers to maintain a complex self-hosted monitoring stack.
He needed monitoring built for SaaS—focused on APIs, web transactions, and real business workflows rather than infrastructure metrics. He also wanted monitoring from outside the Microsoft environment. “I wanted to monitor my environment as if I were a regular customer from outside,” he said.
Erik also wanted a proper status page for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance instead of outdated email lists. From a security standpoint, he needed private monitoring to bypass firewall constraints without exposing public IP addresses.
Above all, he wanted to stop reacting and start preventing problems before they happened.
Evaluating a Comprehensive Monitoring Partner
Erik evaluated several tools, but many lacked SaaS delivery, built-in status pages, or flexible private monitoring. Uptime.com distinguished itself through its completeness.
“The feature set is quite complete,” Erik said, citing DNS checks, SSL certificate monitoring, blacklist monitoring, browser monitoring transactions, and more. The ability to run full API transaction checks directly within the platform was particularly appealing.
“It was relatively quick to evaluate,” he said. “We spun up a test environment, and the list of checks and the completeness of features stood out.”
Erik also highlighted the onboarding and support experience. “One of the things you guys do pretty well is the whole onboarding and reaching out and helping and reacting,” he said. Over time, he has also seen the product mature. “In the past 18 months, I’ve seen the tools improving. You see there’s development going on.”
End-to-End Confidence Across Core Processes
Today, Uptime.com is deeply embedded in Air Miles’ operational strategy. Erik uses it not just to check whether systems are “up,” but to validate that critical business processes actually work.
He runs end-to-end API Checks that simulate real member activity. Scripts verify balances, issue points, confirm they’re added correctly, and validate redemptions.
He also uses browser Transaction Monitoring to simulate full user journeys such as logging in, navigating, and verifying that expected data appears. “That gives me confidence that my whole website is running,” he explained.
One of Erik’s favorite features is Heartbeat Monitoring. Backend scripts send periodic heartbeat signals. If they stop, Uptime.com alerts the team. In one case, an expired API key halted data flow. Uptime detected the issue before it escalated. “We fixed it before anyone knew,” Erik said. “No angry customers, no help desk calls.”
For Erik, the ultimate value goes beyond technical metrics. “What you guys sell is peace of mind — or a good night’s sleep.” With Uptime.com in place, he knows that if something goes wrong, he’ll be alerted. “It just works.”
If your organization depends on reliable digital services, Uptime.com can help you monitor your website and critical workflows with confidence. Sign up for a complimentary demo of Uptime.com to see how website monitoring can give your team the same peace of mind Air Miles relies on every day.