Why to start monitoring today, not after the next outage
Monitoring is usually scheduled right after the outage that proved it was needed. Here is why the setup is worth fifteen minutes now, and the order to do it in.
Blog
The PageLantern blog.
Practical, vendor-neutral guides to monitoring websites, APIs, certificates, DNS, and scheduled jobs — plus the reliability concepts behind uptime, status pages, and on-call.
What unmonitored downtime costs in missed sales
An outage nobody is watching lasts until somebody happens to notice. Here is how to put a number on what that costs you, and which minutes you can actually get back.
How to reduce false-positive alerts
Alert fatigue is a reliability risk. Practical ways to cut false positives: confirmation thresholds, multi-region checks, sensible timeouts, and alerting on symptoms.
A blameless incident post-mortem template
A reusable, blameless post-mortem template: summary, impact, timeline, root cause, detection and response, and concrete follow-up actions that actually get done.
What to put on a status page
A checklist for a status page customers trust: current component status, actionable incident updates, scheduled maintenance, uptime history, and subscriptions.
SLA vs SLO vs SLI: what’s the difference?
A plain-language explainer of SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, how they relate, why your internal target should be stricter than your contract, and where error budgets fit in.
How to calculate uptime percentage (and what the nines mean)
How to calculate uptime percentage, how much downtime each “nine” allows per month and year, and why the measurement window changes the answer.
How to monitor cron jobs with heartbeats
Scheduled jobs fail silently. Learn how dead-man’s-switch heartbeat monitoring works, how to choose an interval and grace period, and what to alert on.
How to monitor DNS records
DNS is a single point of failure for every service you run. Learn what DNS monitoring checks, which records to watch, and how to catch propagation drift and hijacks.
How to monitor SSL certificate expiry
TLS certificates lapse silently and take whole sites down with browser security errors. Learn how certificate expiry monitoring works and how much warning to configure.
How to monitor a REST API
How to monitor API endpoints properly: assert on the response body, not just the status code, handle authentication and multi-step flows, and set a latency budget.
How to monitor a website for downtime
A practical guide to website uptime monitoring: what an external check should verify, how often to run it, and how to turn failures into alerts without the noise.