Uptime monitoring for gaming services

What this team needs to watch

Players notice latency and matchmaking failures instantly and complain loudly. The signal is whether login, matchmaking, and session services respond fast enough, because a slow response feels like an outage to the player waiting on it.

• Login and matchmaking are the first things players feel.
• TCP checks cover the real-time ports HTTP cannot.
• Service grouping keeps one healthy endpoint from masking another failure.

Latency, matchmaking, and sessions

Players feel login and matchmaking failures first, so monitor those paths independently instead of relying on one overall availability signal. Check login and matchmaking over HTTP with a strict timeout so latency registers, then cover the real-time session servers, which run over raw TCP or UDP ports that an HTTP check cannot see — a TCP check confirms the game server is actually accepting connections. Separate content checks on the services returning player and session data catch the case where the endpoint answers but returns nothing usable.

How Sandglass covers it

Use HTTP status checks on login and matchmaking endpoints, TCP checks on the real-time game server ports, and separate content checks on the services that return player or session data. Group checks by service so the affected player path is obvious at a glance.

• Group checks by service, environment, or client so production alerts stay separate from staging noise.
• Combine HTTP, ping, TCP, content, and SSL certificate checks to match each failure mode you care about.
• Add heartbeat checks for scheduled jobs that no customer watches directly but everyone depends on.

Where teams get it wrong

A green login check can still hide a broken matchmaking or session service. Monitor those paths independently so one healthy endpoint does not mask the service players cannot use.