Key Takeaways
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UptimeRobot plus a custom health check endpoint catches service-down events within minutes. A
/api/healthendpoint that tests database connectivity and required env vars is far more reliable than pinging the homepage URL. -
Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights track the performance users actually experience—real device, real connection data, not local Lighthouse scores. Most useful for catching deploy regressions.
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Sentry catches silent exceptions before users report them. Stack traces, browser context, user data—everything you need to reproduce and fix issues you'd otherwise never discover.
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Total monthly cost for all three: $0. The free plans are genuinely sufficient for solo developer-scale services. Upgrade when limits become actual blockers, not preemptively.
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Alert fatigue is the real threat. Keep alerts to the minimum set that requires immediate action. Service down, new error type, error rate spiking. Everything else is a weekly review item, not a notification.
Monitoring isn't something you add after your service grows. It's something you turn on the day you deploy. Smoke detectors don't get installed after the fire.