Monitor

Monitor

This skill is for production monitoring and incident response. For debugging specific bugs, use debug. For pre-launch readiness checks, use go-live. For security-specific monitoring (auth events, API abuse), use secure. For analytics and user behavior tracking, use analytics.

Don't Do Yet

• Don't pay for monitoring tools until you've outgrown the free tiers. UptimeRobot + Sentry free handles most early-stage apps.
• Don't set up DataDog, New Relic, or Grafana. These are enterprise tools. You don't need them with 2 seconds)
• Error rate elevated (2x normal)
• Disk space low (>80%)

Informational (daily digest):

• New errors discovered
• Performance trending down
• Traffic patterns

Tell AI:

Configure monitoring alerts:
- Critical: Text to [phone]
- Important: Email to [email]
- Send summary: Daily at 9am

---

Daily Monitoring Routine

5-minute morning check:

Daily Check:
1. Open monitoring dashboard
2. Check uptime (should be 100% yesterday)
3. Check error count (any spikes?)
4. Check performance (slower than usual?)
5. Review any alerts from overnight

If all green: You're done, 5 minutes.

If red: Investigate using debug skill.

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Reading Monitoring Dashboards

Uptime Dashboard

Green: Site responding Red: Site down or slow to respond

What to check:

• Uptime percentage (target: 99%+)
• Response time (target: 1s)
• Log authentication events
• Don't log sensitive data

Format: JSON with timestamp, level, message, context Send to: [Platform logs or external service]

**Log levels:**
- ERROR: Something broke
- WARN: Something concerning
- INFO: Normal operations
- DEBUG: Detailed debugging info

**Production:** Log ERROR and WARN only.

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## Monitoring Integrations

**Third-party services:**

**Payments (Stripe):**
- Failed payments alert
- Refund requests alert
- Subscription cancellations (daily digest)

**Email (SendGrid):**
- Delivery failures alert
- Bounce rate elevated alert
- Spam complaints alert

**Database:**
- Connection pool exhausted
- Slow queries (>1s)
- Disk space low

**Tell AI:**

Add monitoring for [service]:

• Alert on failures
• Track success rate
• Log errors with context

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## Incident Response

**When alerts fire:**

Incident Response:

1. Acknowledge alert (mark as seen)
2. Assess severity:

• Critical: Site down, payments failing
• High: Errors affecting many users
• Medium: Isolated issues

1. Immediate action:

• Critical: Hotfix or rollback
• High: Fix within hours
• Medium: Fix in next deploy

1. Update users if needed
2. Post-mortem after resolved

**Critical incidents:**

1. Assess impact (how many affected?)
2. Quick fix or rollback
3. Deploy hotfix
4. Verify fixed
5. Monitor closely for hour
6. Update status page if you have one

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## Success Looks Like

✅ Know about issues before users report them
✅ Uptime >99.9%
✅ Errors caught and fixed quickly
✅ Performance trends stable or improving
✅ Daily monitoring routine (5 minutes)
✅ Alerts configured and actionable
✅ Issues resolved proactively

---

## Related Skills

- **debug** — Investigate and fix specific bugs
- **deploy** — Hosting setup and rollback procedures
- **secure** — Security monitoring and hardening
- **analytics** — User behavior tracking and conversion funnels
- **go-live** — Pre-launch readiness (includes monitoring as a checklist item)

## Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [whawkinsiv](https://github.com/whawkinsiv)
- **Source:** [whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills](https://github.com/whawkinsiv/solo-founder-skills)
- **License:** MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.