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How to Monitor Your Netlify Site with Vigilmon

#monitoring #netlify #jamstack #deployment

How to Monitor Your Netlify Site with Vigilmon

Netlify hosts millions of JAMstack sites, serverless functions, and edge-powered applications. It's reliable, but "Netlify is up" doesn't mean your specific site is working — a failed build, a broken Netlify Function, or a misconfigured redirect can silently serve errors. Vigilmon monitors your Netlify deployment from outside Netlify's own infrastructure.

What Can Fail on Netlify?

  • Failed deploy — last deploy had a build error, so Netlify reverted to the previous version
  • Netlify Function timeout — function exceeds 10s (or 26s) limit, returns 503
  • Custom domain DNS misconfiguration — site unreachable from a specific region
  • Netlify Edge Function error — throws unhandled exception, returns 500
  • Environment variable missing — function runs but crashes at runtime
  • Netlify platform incident — CDN degraded in a specific region

Setting Up Vigilmon Monitoring for Netlify

1. Production Site URL 

https://your-site.netlify.app
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or your custom domain:

https://yoursite.com
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Vigilmon setup:

  1. URL: production URL
  2. Expected status: 200
  3. Keyword: a string from your homepage (e.g., your company name)
  4. SSL monitoring: enabled (tracks TLS expiry on custom domains)
  5. Interval: 5 minutes

2. Netlify Function Health Check

Add a simple health function:

// netlify/functions/health.js
exports.handler = async (event) => {
  return {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({ status: 'ok', timestamp: Date.now() }),
  };
};
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This is available at:

https://your-site.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/health
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Monitor with:

  • Expected status: 200
  • Keyword: "ok"
  • Interval: 5 minutes

3. Netlify Edge Function Check

For edge functions (netlify/edge-functions/):

// netlify/edge-functions/edge-health.js
export default async (request) => {
  return new Response(JSON.stringify({ status: 'ok', runtime: 'edge' }), {
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  });
};

export const config = { path: '/edge-health' };
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Monitor https://yoursite.com/edge-health separately from serverless functions.

4. API Route Health (if using Next.js on Netlify)

If you run Next.js on Netlify, your API routes are serverless functions:

https://yoursite.com/api/health
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Add this as a separate monitor.

Monitoring Netlify's Deploy Status via API

Netlify's API lets you check your latest deploy status:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $NETLIFY_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites/{SITE_ID}/deploys?per_page=1"
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You can add this as a Vigilmon HTTP monitor:

  • URL: https://api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites/{SITE_ID}/deploys?per_page=1
  • Header: Authorization: Bearer {NETLIFY_TOKEN}
  • Expected status: 200
  • Keyword: "ready" (indicates last deploy succeeded)

If the last deploy failed, the response won't contain "ready" as the state — Vigilmon alerts you.

Monitoring Content Freshness (for CMS-driven sites)

If your Netlify site rebuilds when content changes (via Contentful, Sanity, or Strapi webhooks):

  1. Monitor the webhook URL you gave to your CMS: 
   https://api.netlify.com/build_hooks/{HOOK_ID}
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  1. Or monitor a page for freshness by checking for content unique to recent updates.

Netlify Status Monitoring

Monitor Netlify's own status:

https://www.netlifystatus.com/api/v2/status.json
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Keyword check: "All Systems Operational".

Alert Configuration

For production marketing sites:

  • 2 consecutive failures → Slack alert
  • 5 consecutive failures → email escalation
  • Reason: Netlify CDN caches aggressively; a single failure may be a CDN hiccup

For Netlify Functions (API routes):

  • 1 failure → immediate alert (functions don't have CDN caching to absorb issues)

For staging/preview:

  • Slack only, lower urgency

Post-Deploy Smoke Test with Netlify Notifications

Combine Netlify's deploy notifications with Vigilmon:

  1. In Netlify → Site → Build & Deploy → Deploy Notifications, add a Slack notification for failed deploys
  2. In Vigilmon, monitor your production URL to catch runtime failures post-deploy

You get notified twice: Netlify tells you the build failed, Vigilmon tells you the site is serving errors.

Summary

Monitor URL What It Catches
Production site yoursite.com Site down, bad content
Serverless function /.netlify/functions/health Function runtime failures
Edge function /edge-health Edge runtime failures
Deploy status API api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites/... Failed deploys
Netlify status netlifystatus.com/api/v2/status.json Platform incidents

Start monitoring your Netlify site with Vigilmon — free plan, no credit card required.

Vigilmon — uptime monitoring with multi-region checks and instant Slack alerts.

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