Why Your Monitoring Strategy Is Incomplete

Hey IH 👋

Last month, one of our clients had their entire checkout system go down. Their internal monitoring showed all green – perfect CPU, healthy memory levels, no errors logged.

But customers couldn't complete purchases. The culprit? A DNS issue that only external monitoring could catch.

This highlights a crucial reality for those of us building and maintaining systems: blind spots exist even in seemingly comprehensive monitoring setups.

Internal vs External: You Need Both

After helping dozens of DevOps teams improve their uptime, I've realized most monitoring strategies have a fundamental problem – they're either too internal or too external focused.

Internal monitoring watches your system health, resources, and logs. It's great at catching resource bottlenecks and application errors early.

External monitoring checks your system availability from outside your network. It shows you what users actually experience and catches issues with external dependencies.

Neither approach alone gives you the full overview.

A Simple Framework That Works

Here's a quick framework we've developed that has worked across different tech stacks:

1. Set up internal early warnings:

   • Resource tracking (CPU, memory, disk)
   • Application logs with error rate alerts
   • Database performance monitoring
   • Service dependency checks

2. Implement external reality checks:

   • Global availability from different regions
   • SSL and DNS monitoring (these silent killers cause major outages)
   • Critical user paths (login, checkout, core features)
   • API response times

3. Connect with smart alerting:

   • Correlate internal and external alerts
   • Use different channels for different severity levels
   • Automate the obvious fixes

Start Simple

You don't need to monitor everything right away. Start with your most critical services first – focus on what directly impacts your users and revenue.

What We're Building

At Bubobot, we're building a solution for external monitoring. We've focused on making it simple to set up, real-time monitoring with 20-s interval, 20+ integrations.

I'd love to hear how you're handling monitoring for your products! What's working? What's been challenging?

#MonitoringTools #InternalVsExternal #ITManagement

Read more: https://bubobot.com/blog/external-vs-internal-monitoring-which-is-better-for-uptime