#monitoring

Articles tagged "monitoring".

18 articles

Heartbeat & Cron Job Monitoring: the Dead Man's Switch Your Backups Deserve
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
6 min read
MCP Server Monitoring: Why "HTTP 200" Means Nothing to an AI Agent
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
5 min read
SLA vs SLO vs SLI: the reliability promise, decoded
Reliability

SLA vs SLO vs SLI: the reliability promise, decoded

Three little acronyms quietly run every serious reliability conversation — and almost everyone mixes them up. Here's what SLA, SLO and SLI actually mean, how they fit together, and how to set ones that won't page you at 3am for nothing.

WatchFor Team
8 min read
Uptime Monitoring 101: how to never be the last to know
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
6 min read
Synthetic vs Real User Monitoring (RUM): what's the difference?
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
API Monitoring Guide: how to watch the endpoints your business runs on
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
4 min read
Observability vs Monitoring: what's the difference (and do you need both)?
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
How to Monitor a Website (a step-by-step guide)
Monitoring

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'.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Server Monitoring Basics: CPU, memory, disk and network
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Database Monitoring: what to watch (and why)
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
What is a Network Port? (and how to monitor one)
Networking

What is a Network Port? (and how to monitor one)

An IP address gets you to the right machine; a port gets you to the right service on it. Here's what ports are, the common ones, and why monitoring them catches outages a website check misses.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Keyword Monitoring: catching the '200 OK but broken' page
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Monitoring Microservices: seeing health across many moving parts
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Monitoring Kubernetes: from pods to nodes to probes
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Monitoring Serverless (Lambda and friends)
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
How Often Should You Monitor? (choosing a check interval)
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
Why Monitor From Multiple Locations?
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read
How to Choose a Monitoring Tool
Monitoring

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.

WatchFor Team
3 min read