Monitoring
Guides, how-tos, and updates on Monitoring.
22 articles
Heartbeat & Cron Job Monitoring: the Dead Man's Switch Your Backups Deserve
Most monitoring checks that something is up. Heartbeat monitoring does the opposite — it alerts when something that should run goes silent. The concept, who needs it, and how to set it up so a dead backup job can't hide for three weeks.
MCP Server Monitoring: Why "HTTP 200" Means Nothing to an AI Agent
MCP servers fail in ways no uptime check can see: the port answers 200 while the handshake breaks, tools vanish, or a tool description is silently rewritten under your agents. Here's how protocol-level MCP monitoring works — and why we built it.
Status Page Best Practices: turning your worst day into trust
A status page is the one place customers look when things go wrong — and most are an afterthought. Here's how to run one that deflects tickets, calms users, and quietly earns trust during an outage.
Uptime Monitoring 101: how to never be the last to know
The worst way to find out your website is down is from an angry customer. This is the beginner-friendly guide to uptime monitoring — what it is, why it matters, and how to set it up so you always hear it first.
Synthetic vs Real User Monitoring (RUM): what's the difference?
Synthetic monitoring and RUM answer two different questions about your site. Here's what each one does, where each shines, and why the best setups use both.
API Monitoring Guide: how to watch the endpoints your business runs on
Your website can be perfectly up while your API quietly fails — and APIs power the integrations, apps and partners you can't see. Here's how to monitor them properly.
What is 99.9% Uptime? The downtime hiding behind the nines
“99.9% uptime” sounds almost perfect — until you do the maths. Here's exactly how much downtime each level of nines allows, how it's calculated, and how to pick a target you can actually hit.
Website Downtime: the most common causes (and how to prevent each)
Most outages aren't mysterious — they come from the same short list of causes, again and again. Here's that list, what each one looks like, and how to stop it taking your site down.
Observability vs Monitoring: what's the difference (and do you need both)?
Monitoring tells you something broke. Observability helps you figure out why. Here's how the two differ, where each fits, and why modern teams lean on both.
Webhooks 101: what they are and how to use them
A webhook is how one app says 'hey, this just happened' to another — instantly, without anyone asking. Here's what webhooks are, how they differ from polling, and how to use them well.
Rate Limiting & HTTP 429 Explained
Rate limiting is how services protect themselves from too many requests — and HTTP 429 is how they say 'slow down'. Here's how it works, and how to handle it gracefully on both sides.
CORS Errors Explained (and how to fix them)
Every web developer meets the dreaded 'blocked by CORS policy' error. It's not a bug — it's a security feature. Here's what CORS is, why the browser blocks your request, and how to fix it properly.
How to Monitor a Website (a step-by-step guide)
Monitoring your website sounds technical, but the essentials take minutes. Here's a plain, step-by-step guide to going from 'I hope it's up' to 'I'll know the second it isn't'.
Server Monitoring Basics: CPU, memory, disk and network
Before an app falls over, the server usually shows it coming. Here are the four resources to always watch — and what 'healthy' versus 'about to break' looks like for each.
Database Monitoring: what to watch (and why)
When the database struggles, everything that depends on it struggles too — usually as timeouts and slow pages. Here's what to monitor so the DB never becomes your silent bottleneck.
Keyword Monitoring: catching the '200 OK but broken' page
A page can return a perfect 200 OK and still be completely broken. Keyword monitoring checks the actual content — so a blank page, an error, or a defacement doesn't slip past your checks.
Monitoring Microservices: seeing health across many moving parts
Microservices trade one big app for dozens of small ones — and turn one dashboard into a puzzle. Here's how to monitor a distributed system without drowning in noise.
Monitoring Kubernetes: from pods to nodes to probes
Kubernetes is brilliant at hiding failures — it restarts and reschedules so smoothly you may not notice trouble until it's everywhere. Here's what to watch so the magic doesn't mask a problem.
Monitoring Serverless (Lambda and friends)
Serverless means no servers to watch — and a few new things that can go wrong. Here's what to monitor when your code runs as functions: cold starts, duration, errors and throttles.
How Often Should You Monitor? (choosing a check interval)
Check too rarely and you find out about outages late; check constantly and you pay for it. Here's how to choose a monitoring interval that matches what each service is actually worth.
Why Monitor From Multiple Locations?
Checking your site from one place gives you one opinion — and it's often wrong. Here's why monitoring from multiple global locations kills false alarms and reveals problems a single check can't see.
How to Choose a Monitoring Tool
There are dozens of monitoring tools, and the marketing all sounds the same. Here's a practical, vendor-neutral checklist of what actually matters — so you pick the one that fits your needs.