Uptime monitoring for startups and indie hackers

What this team needs to watch

A tiny team cannot watch dashboards all day, and the first sign of trouble is often a user email. The goal is the smallest set of checks that catches a real outage and reaches a phone before the founder is tagged on social media.

• Three high-signal checks beat fifty that get muted.
• Transactional email failures are invisible without a heartbeat.
• One shared alert channel keeps a small team aligned.

Monitoring on a budget of attention

For a solo founder or a two-person team, the scarce resource is not money — it is attention. Every alert you create is a future interruption, so the discipline is to add only checks you would actually act on tonight. Start with the app's main entry point, one content check on the flow that defines your product (sign-up, the core action), and a heartbeat on the invisible job that would embarrass you most if it stopped — usually transactional email. Route everything to one Slack channel you already read, add a retry threshold so a single blip stays quiet, and expand only when a real incident shows you a gap. A small, trusted set of alerts beats a comprehensive set you have learned to ignore.

How Sandglass covers it

Start with one HTTP check on the app, one content check on a critical flow, and one heartbeat on the job that sends transactional email. Send alerts to a Slack webhook channel everyone already watches and resist adding checks you will not act on.

• 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

More checks are not better when nobody triages them. A handful of high-signal checks with a clear owner beats fifty noisy ones that train the team to ignore alerts.