Start With What Matters
Do not monitor everything. Start with the endpoints that directly impact your users: your main website, API endpoints, authentication service, and payment processing. These are the services where downtime costs real money.
A common mistake is setting up 200 monitors on day one. Start with 5-10 critical endpoints, configure them properly, and expand from there.
Choose the Right Check Interval
Check interval is a balance between detection speed and noise:
- 15-30 seconds: For critical revenue-generating services (payment APIs, authentication)
- 1-2 minutes: For important but non-critical services (marketing site, blog, docs)
- 5 minutes: For internal tools and non-customer-facing services
Faster is not always better. A 15-second interval generates 5,760 checks per day. Make sure your alerting can handle the volume without creating noise.
Use Multi-Location Monitoring
This is the single most impactful improvement you can make. Checking from a single location is inherently unreliable. Distributed monitoring with consensus eliminates false positives and gives you geographic visibility.
At minimum, monitor from 3 locations. 4-5 locations provide excellent coverage with strong consensus reliability.
Configure Smart Alerting
Not every alert should go to every person through every channel. Build a tiered alerting strategy:
- Tier 1 (Critical): Phone call + SMS + Slack to on-call engineer. Revenue-impacting services only.
- Tier 2 (High): Slack + Email to engineering team. Important services.
- Tier 3 (Low): Email digest. Non-critical services, performance degradation.
Set Up Status Pages
A public status page does two things: it reduces support ticket volume during incidents, and it builds trust with your users. When something goes wrong, your users want to know you are aware of it.
Keep status pages simple: list your critical services, show current status, and update it during incidents. Do not try to show every metric - just the information your users need.
Monitor the Full Stack
A comprehensive monitoring setup covers multiple layers:
- HTTP(S): Is the endpoint returning 200? Is the response body correct?
- SSL: Is the certificate valid? When does it expire?
- DNS: Are records resolving correctly?
- TCP: Are critical ports open and responding?
- Content: Does the response contain expected keywords?
Review and Iterate
Set a monthly review cadence:
- Which monitors triggered alerts? Were they real or false?
- Are check intervals appropriate for each service criticality?
- Are there new services that need monitoring?
- Is the on-call rotation fair and sustainable?
Monitoring is not set-and-forget. It is a living system that should evolve with your infrastructure.