I Built a Full-Stack Uptime Monitoring SaaS in 30 Days — Here's Everything I Learned

#webdev #ai #showdev #devops

Six months ago I was manually refreshing my client's website after every deployment, praying it stayed up.

That's when I decided to build WhistleBlower — a real-time uptime monitoring tool with alerts, status pages, and incident tracking.

Here's what I built and what I learned.

What WhistleBlower does

🔴 HTTP, TCP, PING, and DNS monitoring — not just websites
📧 Instant alerts via email, Slack, Discord, and SMS
📊 Public status pages — your users always know what's up
💓 Heartbeat monitoring — know when your cron jobs die silently
🔒 SSL certificate expiry alerts — never get caught with an expired cert
👥 Team & on-call scheduling for agencies

The tech stack

Frontend: Next.js 14 + Tailwind CSS
Backend: Node.js + Express + TypeScript
Database: MySQL (Railway)
Emails: Resend
Payments: Razorpay
Deploy: Vercel (frontend) + Railway (backend)
Cron worker: GitHub Actions (free!)

The hardest part

ICMP ping is blocked on containerized environments like Railway and Docker. My PING monitors were silently failing in production while working fine locally.

The fix? A 3-strategy fallback:

ICMP ping (works on bare metal / GitHub Actions)
TCP connect to port 443, then 80
DNS lookup as final fallback

async function checkPing(host: string): Promise<CheckResult> {
  // Strategy 1: ICMP
  const icmpResult = await tryICMP(host);
  if (icmpResult.isUp) return icmpResult;

  // Strategy 2: TCP fallback (containers block ICMP)
  for (const port of [443, 80]) {
    const tcp = await tryTCP(host, port);
    if (tcp.isUp) return tcp;
  }

  // Strategy 3: DNS
  return tryDNS(host);
}