Cover the essentials
Monitor the main landing page, API, and payment provider.
Use 30-second intervals and alert only founders plus one backup.
Day one setup
- HTTP check on homepage
- Checkout synthetic
- Cron heartbeat for billing emails
Keep cost low
Use Watch.Dog free tier with 10 monitors and multi channel alerts.
Turn on status page subscribers to keep investors informed.
Do not over engineer dashboards; focus on the three revenue paths first.
Automate learning
After each incident, record what broke and make it a runbook.
Upgrade only when you outgrow monitor limits, not before.