What to monitor before you buy a monitoring tool
Most monitoring starts and ends with a check that loads the homepage every five minutes. It will catch a dead server and miss almost everything that has ever taken a business offline in practice — an expired certificate, a payment gateway timing out, a login that returns a 200 with an error page.
2 min readOadbox
Check the thing the customer does
A homepage responds even when the database is down, because it is cached. The meaningful check exercises a path with a dependency: a search, a login, an availability lookup, a price fetch.
One well-chosen transactional check is worth twenty static ones, and it is the difference between finding out from your monitoring and finding out from a customer.
The four signals worth having on day one
- Availability of a real user path, from more than one location.
- Response time with a threshold, because slow is a failure mode too.
- Certificate and domain expiry, checked weeks ahead rather than on the day.
- A heartbeat from every scheduled job that matters — backups, invoicing runs, syncs.
The last one catches the outages nobody sees: the nightly backup that has silently failed for six weeks, discovered on the day it is needed.
An alert nobody acts on is worse than none
Alert fatigue is not a personality flaw, it is a design outcome. If a channel produces false alarms, people stop reading it, and the real alert arrives into a room that has learned to ignore that sound.
Every alert should name what broke, what the customer sees, and who is expected to act. If you cannot write that sentence, the check is not ready to page anyone.
Publish the status internally first
A shared view of what is up, what is slow and what recently broke ends the most wasteful conversation in operations — three people independently checking whether it is just them.
It also creates the record you need for the harder question, which is not whether you were down last Tuesday but how often you have been down this quarter.
Written by the Oadbox team. Something here not match how it works in your business? We would genuinely like to hear it — connect@oadbox.com.