How to Monitor PlanetScale Database Applications with Vigilmon

PlanetScale is a serverless MySQL database built on Vitess, loved for its branching model and zero-downtime schema migrations. But like any external service, PlanetScale can have outages - and your app needs to detect and report them.

This guide shows how to add PlanetScale health checks to your application and monitor them with Vigilmon.

What Can Go Wrong with PlanetScale

• PlanetScale regional outages
• Connection limits on free/hobby plans exceeded
• Query timeouts on complex joins (Vitess limitations)
• Branch promotion issues during deployments
• SSL handshake failures

Step 1: Node.js Health Check

const mysql = require('mysql2/promise');

const pool = mysql.createPool({
  host: process.env.DATABASE_HOST,
  user: process.env.DATABASE_USERNAME,
  password: process.env.DATABASE_PASSWORD,
  database: process.env.DATABASE_NAME,
  ssl: { rejectUnauthorized: true }, // PlanetScale requires SSL
});

app.get('/health', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const [rows] = await pool.execute('SELECT 1 as ok');
    res.json({ status: 'healthy', database: 'connected', provider: 'planetscale' });
  } catch (err) {
    res.status(503).json({ status: 'unhealthy', database: 'error', error: err.message });
  }
});

Step 2: Next.js API Route

// pages/api/health.ts
export default async function handler(req, res) {
  try {
    await db.$queryRaw`SELECT 1`; // Prisma
    res.status(200).json({ status: 'healthy', database: 'ok' });
  } catch (error) {
    res.status(503).json({ status: 'unhealthy', database: 'error' });
  }
}

Step 3: Django

from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.db import connection

def health(request):
    try:
        with connection.cursor() as cursor:
            cursor.execute('SELECT 1')
        return JsonResponse({'status': 'healthy', 'database': 'ok'})
    except Exception as e:
        return JsonResponse({'status': 'unhealthy', 'database': str(e)}, status=503)

Step 4: Connect Vigilmon

1. Sign up at vigilmon.online
2. Add Monitor -> HTTP Monitor
3. URL: https://yourapp.com/health
4. Interval: 1 minute, Expected status: 200
5. Configure email/Slack alerts

Add SSL Certificate Monitor for your domain too.

PlanetScale Branching

Monitor each branch environment independently:

• Production: https://yourapp.com/health
• Staging: https://staging.yourapp.com/health

This catches schema promotion errors that break production.

Failure Coverage

Failure	App Logs	Vigilmon
PlanetScale regional outage	DB errors	Yes - health 503
Connection limit exceeded	Errors	Yes - health 503
App process crash	Silent	Yes - HTTP monitor
SSL handshake failure	Errors	Yes - SSL monitor

Free Tier

Vigilmon free tier: 5 monitors, 1-minute intervals, email alerts. No credit card required.

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Start monitoring free at vigilmon.online