A couple weeks ago I wrote about building a unified API gateway because I was tired of managing multiple keys.
It's been running for a while now with some real users. The core functionality works fine. The hard part turned out to be the stuff around it — specifically, knowing whether it's actually working when you're not looking.
So I set up health monitoring. Simple script, checks the site every 30 minutes, reports if something's wrong. Sounded easy.
Here's what happened next:
Day 1: Script works. Great.
Day 2: Alert: site down. Panic. Check the site — it's fine. Cloudflare glitch.
Day 3: Alert: site down. Different error — SSL handshake fail. Turns out my local proxy was flaky. Not the server's fault.
Day 4-7: Keep tuning. Add retry logic. Add a 3-strike rule before alerting. Remove noisy checks.
Two weeks in, I'm in a decent place. The monitoring is stable. But I've learned that building the product is the easy part. Keeping it running quietly in the background — that's the actual work.
For anyone building a side project: budget time for the ops stuff early. Your future self will thank you.
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