I built a monitoring dashboard that streams live instead of polling. Was the complexity worth it?

Most dashboards poll every 30 or 60 seconds. It's simple and cheap. You refresh, you get the latest state, done.

I went the other way and made each check result stream to the browser the moment it finishes, over a WebSocket. Watching it is genuinely different. During a live incident you see checks fail in real time across regions, so "is it actually down or just down for me" becomes something you watch instead of guess.

The honest part is that streaming takes more engineering than polling to make reliable. A poll can't really break. A live connection can drop, go quiet, or sit there looking open while it's actually dead. So you build for all of it: reconnects, keepalives, and a clean fall back to a normal fetch the moment the socket goes, so you're never left staring at stale data. Do that work and it's rock solid. The complexity is the price of real-time, not a crack in it.

I'd build it again just for how it feels during a live incident. What I'm less sure about is whether most users would even notice, or whether polling is the smarter, boring default.

For something like monitoring, where do you land? Real-time worth the extra engineering, or not?

Watch a showcase of the live page here