How to Monitor Your GitLab CI/CD Pipeline with Vigilmon

GitLab CI/CD is the backbone of modern software delivery. A failing pipeline means blocked releases, frustrated teams, and delayed features. With Vigilmon, you can monitor your GitLab runners and the applications they deploy — catching failures at every stage.

What to Monitor in a GitLab CI/CD Setup

1. The deployed application — is it up and responding?
2. The staging/preview environment — did the deploy succeed?
3. The GitLab runner — is it reachable and processing jobs?
4. Health endpoints — do APIs respond correctly post-deploy?

Setting Up Post-Deploy Monitoring

Add a Health Check to Your App

Every service deployed by GitLab CI should expose a health endpoint:

// Express.js example
app.get('/health', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ status: 'ok', version: process.env.APP_VERSION });
});

Monitor It with Vigilmon

1. Sign in at vigilmon.online
2. Create a monitor for your app's health endpoint
3. Set check interval: 1 minute
4. Configure Slack alerts to your #deployments channel

Connect Vigilmon Webhooks to GitLab CI

Add a health check to your .gitlab-ci.yml post-deploy stage:

stages:
  - build
  - test
  - deploy
  - verify

verify_deployment:
  stage: verify
  script:
    - sleep 30
    - curl --fail https://yourdomain.com/health
    - echo "Deployment verified"
  only:
    - main

This ensures every pipeline verifies the deploy succeeded before marking it green.

Monitoring GitLab Runner Health

If you self-host GitLab runners, monitor the runner machine:

1. Install a simple HTTP health service on the runner
2. Create a Vigilmon monitor pointing to it
3. Alert if the runner goes offline

Environment-Specific Monitoring

Set up separate Vigilmon monitors for each environment:

Environment	URL	Alert Channel
Production	https://app.yourdomain.com/health	#ops-alerts
Staging	https://staging.yourdomain.com/health	#engineering

Alerting on Deployment Failures

Configure Vigilmon to:

1. Alert immediately when production goes down post-deploy
2. Create an incident in PagerDuty or OpsGenie
3. Post to Slack with a link to the GitLab pipeline

This creates a full incident feedback loop: deploy → monitor → alert → rollback.

SSL Certificate Monitoring for GitLab Deployments

Vigilmon automatically tracks SSL certificates on all HTTPS monitors. When your GitLab CI deploys a service with a new SSL cert, Vigilmon will verify the cert is valid immediately post-deploy and alert 30/14/7 days before expiry.

Conclusion

GitLab CI/CD + Vigilmon creates a complete delivery + monitoring loop:

• ✅ Verify every deployment with health checks
• ✅ 1-minute uptime monitoring between deployments
• ✅ SSL certificate tracking
• ✅ Slack/PagerDuty/email alerts
• ✅ Public status pages for your deployed services

Start monitoring your GitLab CI deployments in minutes. Sign up free at vigilmon.online.