Vigilmon vs Raygun: Uptime Monitoring vs Error Tracking (2026)

Raygun and Vigilmon both monitor your application health, but from different perspectives. This comparison breaks down when you need each tool - and when you need both.

What Is Raygun?

Raygun is an application performance monitoring and error tracking platform that instruments your code from inside. It captures:

• Unhandled exceptions with full stack traces
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) - actual page load times
• Deployment tracking
• Performance profiling per endpoint
• Crash reporting for mobile apps

What Is Vigilmon?

Vigilmon monitors your application from outside your infrastructure:

• HTTP/HTTPS uptime checks every 1 minute
• SSL certificate expiry monitoring (30/14/7 day alerts)
• Multi-region probes
• Status pages for user-facing communication
• Heartbeat monitoring for scheduled jobs

The Fundamental Difference

Raygun sees:               Vigilmon sees:
  Exception in line 47       HTTP GET -> 503
  Stack trace                DNS resolution time
  Browser used               TLS handshake
  User affected              Response time
  Deploy version             Certificate days left

Raygun knows why your code threw an exception. Vigilmon knows if your service is reachable at all.

What Raygun Catches That Vigilmon Doesn't

• NullReferenceException in a specific controller
• JavaScript error in user's browser (RUM)
• Memory leak growing over 6 hours
• Slow database query affecting one endpoint
• Error spike after a deployment
• Mobile app crashes by device type

What Vigilmon Catches That Raygun Doesn't

• Total process crash (no process = no Raygun data)
• DNS failure making app unreachable
• SSL certificate expired (padlock gone)
• Network partition between users and server
• Cloud provider regional outage
• Load balancer misconfiguration after deploy

Pricing

	Vigilmon	Raygun
Free tier	5 monitors	Limited trial
Starting price	~$10/month	~$9/user/month
Pricing model	Flat/per monitor	Per user
5-user team cost	$10-20/month	$45+/month

For small teams, Vigilmon is significantly cheaper. Raygun's per-user model scales up quickly.

Raygun's Uptime Monitoring

Raygun includes basic uptime monitoring (Pulse feature) but it's not the primary focus:

• Longer check intervals than Vigilmon
• No multi-region probes
• No dedicated SSL monitoring
• No heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs

For teams already on Raygun, the built-in uptime check may suffice for simple cases. But for production apps with SLAs, Vigilmon's 1-minute multi-region approach is worth adding.

Best Setup for Different Teams

Solo dev / side project:
Vigilmon free tier only ($0) - catch downtime instantly.

Small team, budget-conscious:
Vigilmon (~$10-15/month) + Sentry free tier (error tracking). Better value than Raygun.

Team needing RUM:
Vigilmon (external uptime) + Raygun (RUM + error tracking). Different tools, complementary coverage.

Enterprise:
Both - Raygun for code-level APM and RUM, Vigilmon for external uptime SLA verification.

Integration Example

// Your health endpoint - Vigilmon pings this, Raygun instruments it

app.get('/health', async (req, res) => {
  try {
    await db.query('SELECT 1');
    res.json({ status: 'healthy' });
  } catch (err) {
    // Raygun captures this exception with full context
    raygun.send(err, { route: '/health' });
    // Vigilmon detects the 503 and alerts your on-call
    res.status(503).json({ status: 'unhealthy', error: err.message });
  }
});

When this returns 503:

• Vigilmon fires an alert within 60 seconds
• Raygun shows you the exception with stack trace

Verdict

Need	Tool
"Is my site up right now?"	Vigilmon
"Why did my site go down?"	Raygun
"Which browser caused errors?"	Raygun
"Is my SSL about to expire?"	Vigilmon
"Did my deploy introduce errors?"	Raygun
"Are my cron jobs running?"	Vigilmon heartbeat

For most development teams: start with Vigilmon for external visibility. Add Raygun when you need to debug specific exceptions and understand user impact.

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