The Uptime Monitoring Checklist for SaaS Launches (What You Actually Need)

Most developers set up monitoring after something breaks. By then, users have already bounced, support tickets have piled up, and the outage has left a bad impression on people who were evaluating your product.

This checklist covers what to have in place before you launch - not as an aspirational list, but as the practical minimum that protects your user experience.

Before You Launch: The Essentials

1. External HTTP Monitor on Your Main Domain

Your homepage is the first thing potential users see. If it's down and you don't know it, every ad dollar, every tweet, every dev.to article driving traffic is wasted.

• Monitor https://yourdomain.com from an external service
• Set check interval to 1 minute
• Configure Slack or email alerts

2. API Health Endpoint

Add a /health route to your backend that checks critical dependencies:

javascript
app.get('/health', async (req, res) => {
try {
await db.query('SELECT 1'); // database check
res.json({ status: 'ok' });
} catch (err) {
res.status(503).json({ status: 'error', message: err.message });
}
});


Then monitor this endpoint with keyword matching - check that the response contains "status":"ok", not just that it returns HTTP 200. A crashed database might still return 200 with an error body if your error handling isn't tight.

3. SSL Certificate Monitor

SSL expiry is one of the most avoidable outages. Your browser-based certificate auto-renewal (Let's Encrypt) can fail silently.

Add a separate SSL monitor with a 14-day expiry alert. You want to know about renewal failures two weeks before users start seeing security warnings.

4. Authentication Flow Monitor

Your login page is critical infrastructure. A broken auth flow means zero new activations and angry existing users.

Monitor your login endpoint. If your auth service has a health endpoint, add a separate monitor for it.

5. Email Deliverability Check

This one isn't a monitor in the traditional sense, but it's equally critical: verify that your transactional email is working before you launch.

Send a test signup email. Check it arrives in the inbox (not spam). Verify the confirmation link works. Email issues are invisible in monitoring dashboards but immediately apparent to users.

After Launch: What to Add

6. Monitors for Each Critical User Path

Think through your core user journey:

• Sign up page
• Pricing page (if it loads Stripe checkout)
• Dashboard / app entry point
• API endpoints that power key features

Add a monitor for each step where a failure would cause user-visible problems.

7. Heartbeat Monitors for Background Jobs

If you run cron jobs or scheduled tasks (sending weekly digest emails, generating reports, syncing data), set up heartbeat monitoring.

A heartbeat monitor alerts you if a job doesn't run - catching stuck or dead background workers that don't produce errors, just silence.

`ash

At the end of your cron job

curl -X POST https://your-monitoring-service.com/heartbeat/your-id
`

8. Multi-Region Verification

Single-region monitoring creates false positive risk. A transient network failure between your monitor and your server looks like an outage.

Use a monitoring service with multi-region consensus - alerts only fire when a failure is confirmed from multiple geographic locations. This eliminates the 2am wake-up for something that wasn't actually down.

9. Dependency Monitoring

Your app depends on third parties: Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, your CDN. If Stripe's API is down, your checkout fails - even though your infrastructure is healthy.

Check your key providers' status pages. Some monitoring services let you include third-party status page feeds in your dashboard. At minimum, bookmark status.stripe.com, status.twilio.com, etc.

10. Response Time Baselines

Set alert thresholds for response time degradation, not just downtime. A page that normally loads in 200ms taking 3000ms is a bad user experience even if your monitor shows "up."

What NOT to Clutter Your Monitoring With

• Internal metrics dashboards: CPU, memory, disk - useful for debugging, not for launch-readiness monitoring
• Too many monitors too early: 20 monitors you ignore is worse than 5 monitors you act on
• Uptime SLA reports nobody reads: Focus on alert quality first

Quick-Start Checklist

Before your launch:

• [ ] Homepage HTTP monitor (1-minute checks)
• [ ] API /health endpoint with keyword matching
• [ ] SSL certificate monitor (14-day expiry alert)
• [ ] Auth flow monitor
• [ ] Test email deliverability end-to-end
• [ ] Alert routing verified (Slack message or email received)

After launch:

• [ ] Monitors for each critical user path
• [ ] Heartbeat monitors for scheduled jobs
• [ ] Multi-region consensus enabled
• [ ] Third-party status pages bookmarked

Getting Started

Vigilmon covers HTTP monitoring with multi-region consensus, keyword verification, SSL monitoring, and heartbeat monitoring - everything on this checklist. Free tier includes 5 monitors with 5-minute checks; paid plans add 1-minute checks.

The best time to set up monitoring is before something breaks. The second best time is now.