DEV Community

Vigilmon
Vigilmon

Posted on

How to Monitor Your Upstash Redis and Kafka with Vigilmon

#monitoring #upstash #redis #serverless

How to Monitor Your Upstash Redis and Kafka with Vigilmon

Upstash is a serverless Redis and Kafka service widely used in Next.js, edge functions, and serverless architectures. Since Upstash usage is billed per request and has rate limits on free plans, failures can be silent — your app returns errors but no alarm fires. Vigilmon gives you HTTP-level monitoring for your Upstash databases.

What Can Fail with Upstash?

  • Database URL token rotated — requests return 401
  • Request quota exceeded — daily/monthly limit hit, returns 429
  • Database deleted — returns 404 or connection error
  • Region-specific outage — Upstash cluster in one region is degraded
  • QStash delivery failures — scheduled messages stop running

Monitoring Upstash Redis via REST API

Upstash Redis exposes a REST API you can query without a Redis client:

https://{DATABASE_HOST}/ping
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

With your REST token:

curl https://YOUR_DATABASE_URL.upstash.io/ping \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_REST_TOKEN'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Expected response: "+PONG\r\n"

Vigilmon setup:

  1. URL: https://YOUR_DATABASE_URL.upstash.io/ping
  2. Header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_REST_TOKEN
  3. Expected status: 200
  4. Keyword: PONG
  5. Interval: 5 minutes

Testing Key Operations

Beyond ping, test a read/write cycle:

GET https://YOUR_DB.upstash.io/set/vigilmon_health/ok
GET https://YOUR_DB.upstash.io/get/vigilmon_health
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Expected: {"result": "OK"} and {"result": "ok"}

This catches cases where the database is up but writes are failing.

Monitoring Upstash Kafka via REST API

Upstash Kafka also exposes a REST API:

curl https://YOUR_KAFKA_URL.upstash.io/info \
  -H 'Upstash-Email: your@email.com' \
  -H 'Upstash-Password: YOUR_REST_PASSWORD'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Expected: 200 OK with cluster info JSON.

Vigilmon setup:

  1. URL: https://YOUR_KAFKA_URL.upstash.io/info
  2. Headers:
    • Upstash-Email: your@email.com
    • Upstash-Password: YOUR_REST_PASSWORD
  3. Expected status: 200
  4. Keyword: "cluster-id" or "broker-count"
  5. Interval: 5 minutes

Monitoring QStash (Upstash Message Queue)

QStash schedules and delivers HTTP messages (cron jobs, delayed tasks). Monitor the QStash API:

curl https://qstash.upstash.io/v2/schedules \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_QSTASH_TOKEN'
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This lists your active schedules. A 200 response confirms QStash API is reachable and your token is valid.

Vigilmon setup for QStash:

  1. URL: https://qstash.upstash.io/v2/schedules
  2. Header: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_QSTASH_TOKEN
  3. Expected status: 200
  4. Keyword: "scheduleId" (or just verify 200)
  5. Interval: 10 minutes (QStash issues tend to be gradual, not sudden)

Monitoring Your QStash Receiver

QStash delivers messages to your endpoint. If your receiver is down, QStash retries, but eventually gives up. Monitor your receiver:

https://yourapp.com/api/qstash/handler
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Expect 200 (or 405 for GET if it only accepts POST — adjust expected status accordingly).

Alert Configuration

For Upstash Redis (session store, rate limiting, caching):

  • 1 failure → immediate Slack alert
  • 3 consecutive → page on-call
  • Reason: lost Redis = lost sessions, broken rate limits

For Upstash Kafka (event streaming):

  • 2–3 failures → Slack alert
  • More tolerant since events may be buffered

For QStash (scheduled jobs):

  • Monitor the scheduled job outcome via your app's health endpoint, not just QStash API
  • 1 failure on receiver → alert immediately

Monitoring Upstash's Status 

https://status.upstash.com/api/v2/status.json
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Add this as a keyword monitor checking for "All Systems Operational" or absence of incidents.

Summary

Monitor Endpoint What It Catches
Redis PING /ping Database unreachable, bad token
Redis Write /set/key/value Write operations failing
Kafka Info /info Kafka cluster down
QStash API /v2/schedules Queue management API down
QStash Receiver Your app URL Message delivery endpoint down

Monitor your Upstash databases on Vigilmon — free plan, no credit card needed.

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

Top comments (0)