Monitor your customer-facing endpoints first
Every SaaS product has endpoints that users interact with directly. These are your top monitoring priority.
Start with your app dashboard. If users log into app.yourcompany.com, monitor that URL. Then add your authentication endpoint. If users cannot log in, the rest of your monitoring does not matter.
Add your primary API endpoints. If your product has a REST API that customers integrate with, monitor the endpoints they call most. A /v1/health endpoint is fine, but it may return 200 while your actual data endpoints are throwing 500 errors. Monitor the endpoints your users hit.
Add your billing and payments flow. If Stripe or Paddle webhooks stop arriving, or your subscription management endpoint goes down, you are losing money. Monitor the endpoints that touch revenue.
Check your background jobs
Your server is up. Your API returns 200. Your dashboard loads. Everything looks fine. But your nightly database backup has been silently failing for two weeks. Your email queue is backed up with 8,000 undelivered messages. Your data export pipeline stalled three days ago.
This is the monitoring gap that catches most teams. Uptime monitoring covers the request-response path. It does not cover scheduled tasks, background workers, or async pipelines.
Heartbeat monitoring fills this gap. Each scheduled task gets a unique URL. When the task runs successfully, it pings that URL. If the ping does not arrive within the expected window, you get an alert. The setup is a single curl command at the end of your cron script.
Monitor these jobs at minimum:
- Database backups
- Email delivery queues
- Billing and invoice generation
- Data syncs and exports
- Log rotation and cleanup
- Certificate renewal automation
Learn more about heartbeat monitoring and how it catches what uptime checks miss.
Pick the right check interval
Not every endpoint needs the same check frequency. Align your intervals with the business impact of downtime.
30-second checks are for revenue-critical endpoints: your checkout flow, your primary API, your authentication service. If these go down, you are losing money or locking users out. You need to know as fast as possible.
1-minute checks work for most production services. Your app dashboard, secondary APIs, status endpoints. Fast enough to catch real issues, slow enough to avoid false alarms.
5-minute checks are fine for lower-priority endpoints: marketing pages, documentation sites, internal tools. If the marketing site is down for 4 minutes, the business impact is low.
The faster your checks, the sooner you know. But faster checks also mean more data, more noise, and potentially higher costs. Match the interval to the impact.
Set up alerting that does not burn out your team
Alert fatigue is the silent killer of monitoring. When every minor blip triggers a page, your team stops paying attention. They mute the channel. They ignore the emails. Then a real incident happens and nobody notices.
Use alert escalation thresholds. Require 2 or 3 consecutive failures before an alert fires. This filters out transient network issues that self-resolve in seconds. A single failed check is not an incident. Three in a row is.
Route alerts by severity. Critical monitors go to PagerDuty or on-call phones. Warning-level monitors go to a Slack channel. Informational monitors go to email or a dashboard. Do not send everything to the same place.
Use quiet hours for maintenance. If you deploy every Tuesday at 2 AM, suppress alerts on affected monitors during that window. Your team knows about the deployment. They do not need to be paged because the app restarted.
Separate alert channels from discussion channels. Your #alerts channel should only contain automated alert messages. Human discussion happens in #ops or #engineering. This keeps the alert feed clean and scannable.
Build a status page your users will actually check
Your status page is not just a box to tick. It is a communication tool that reduces support load during incidents.
Put it on your own domain (status.yourcompany.com). Customize it with your branding. Link to it from your app footer, your support documentation, and your error pages.
When an incident happens, post updates. “We are investigating reports of elevated API errors” is better than silence. “The issue has been identified as a database connection pool exhaustion. We are scaling up.” tells users you know what is wrong. “Monitoring recovery. API latency is back to normal.” closes the loop.
A status page that updates automatically from your monitoring data means you do not have to manually flip switches during an incident. The page reflects reality. You focus on fixing the problem. Learn more about PingWatchdog status pages.
Review your incidents
After every incident, spend 10 minutes reviewing what happened. Look at the timeline. How long did it take to detect? How long to respond? How long to fix?
These three numbers are your core reliability metrics: mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and mean time to resolve (MTTResolve). Track them over time. Are you getting faster? Slower?
Use incident data to justify improvements. If 40% of your incidents are caused by database connection issues, that is a signal to invest in connection pooling or read replicas. If SSL cert expiry causes incidents every 90 days, automate certificate renewal.
PingWatchdog auto-creates incidents when monitors go down and auto-resolves them when services recover. You get a full timeline without manual work. Learn more about incident management.
Layer your monitoring
One tool cannot cover everything. Use PingWatchdog for external monitoring: uptime, SSL, heartbeat, status pages. Use application performance monitoring (APM) tools like Datadog or Sentry for internal metrics. Use log aggregation for debugging.
The external view tells you if users can reach your service. The internal view tells you why. Both matter.
Compare monitoring tools to find the right stack for your team.