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Production Reliability Checklist
22 items to bulletproof your monitoring setup and sleep better at night.
0 / 22 completed
🔴 Critical (Do First)
Monitor all user-facing endpoints
Every page, API route, and webhook that users interact with should have uptime monitoring. Missing one means blind spots.
High Priority
Set realistic timeout thresholds
Don't use defaults. A 30s timeout for an API that normally responds in 200ms will hide performance degradation until it's too late. Set to 2-3x normal response time.
High Priority
Configure alert channels per severity
Critical incidents → SMS/Push immediately. Warnings → Email digest. Don't wake people up for non-critical issues.
High Priority
Test your alerts actually fire
Create a test endpoint that returns 500, verify you get the alert. 40% of monitoring setups fail this test.
High Priority
Add status code validation
A 200 OK with an error message in the body is still a failure. Validate response content, not just HTTP status.
High Priority
🟡 Important (Do Soon)
Enable SSL certificate monitoring
Get alerted 30 days before cert expiry, not when browsers start showing security warnings.
Medium Priority
Set up duplicate alert suppression
If an endpoint fails 10 times in 5 minutes, you need 1 alert, not 10. Deduplication prevents alert fatigue.
Medium Priority
Monitor from multiple regions
Your server might be fine, but what if AWS us-east-1 has issues? Multi-region checks catch provider-specific outages.
Medium Priority
Create a public status page
Users check Twitter when things break. A status page gives them answers without opening support tickets.
Medium Priority
Add webhook integrations
Slack, Discord, PagerDuty — send alerts where your team already lives. Email-only alerting slows response time.
Medium Priority
Define incident severity levels
SEV1: Revenue-impacting outage. SEV2: Degraded performance. SEV3: Non-critical service down. Clear definitions prevent confusion at 3am.
Medium Priority
Set up on-call rotation tracking
Who gets paged at 2am? Document this. Rotate weekly to prevent burnout.
Medium Priority
🟢 Nice to Have (Eventually)
Monitor third-party dependencies
Payment processor, email service, CDN — if they go down, you go down. Track their status pages or monitor their endpoints directly.
Add response time baselines
Alert when response time exceeds 2x normal, not just on timeout. Catch slow degradation before users complain.
Set up synthetic transactions
Beyond ping checks: log in, add to cart, check out. Full user journeys catch logic errors that uptime checks miss.
Create runbooks for common alerts
When database CPU spikes, what do you do? Document the steps. Future you (and your team) will thank you.
Enable maintenance windows
Scheduled deploys shouldn't trigger alerts. Configure windows so you only get paged for real issues.
Track SLA/SLO compliance
99.9% uptime means 8.7 hours of downtime per year. Are you hitting your targets? Measure it.
Set up log aggregation
When alerts fire, you need logs. Centralized logging (even basic grep) speeds up debugging significantly.
Pro tip: Start with the Critical section. Get those 5 items done, and you've eliminated 80% of common monitoring failures. The rest can wait.
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OpsPulse handles 18 of these 22 items out of the box — including alert deduplication, multi-region checks, and SSL monitoring.
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