If customers tell you your website or app is down, it's too late. Monitoring detects problems early – often before anyone notices.
What to monitor
- Uptime: is the website or API reachable from different locations?
- Performance: response times and page load speed
- Errors: application exceptions and failed requests
- Resources: CPU, memory, disk space, database connections
- Certificates and domains: expiry dates
- Backups: did last night's backup succeed?
- Business metrics: orders per hour, failed payments, form submissions
Logs, metrics and traces
- Metrics show trends (response time, CPU usage)
- Logs show what happened in detail
- Traces follow one request through several services
Together they are called observability.
Tools
- Uptime checks: Uptime Kuma, Better Stack, cloud provider checks
- Metrics and dashboards: Prometheus and Grafana, cloud monitoring
- Error tracking: Sentry
- Log management: Loki, Elastic, cloud logging
Alerts that work
- Alert on symptoms users feel, not every small metric
- Define severity levels and who is responsible
- Send alerts where people see them (email, Teams, Slack, SMS)
- Avoid alert fatigue – too many false alarms get ignored
- Document what to do for each alert (runbooks)
Status pages
A public status page informs customers during incidents and reduces support requests.
After an incident
Write a short post-mortem: what happened, impact, root cause and actions to prevent it next time.
Monitoring is included in our hosting and operations services – with alerts to our team, so problems get fixed fast.
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