Monitoring Checklist: What to Set Up Before You Launch

Your first users are about to arrive. Do you know when your product goes down? Do they? Here's the monitoring setup you should have in place before launch day — not after the first incident.

Most founders think about monitoring after the first bad incident — after a user emails saying the site has been down for two hours, or after they find out about a broken checkout from a tweet. The monitoring setup below takes about 30 minutes. It's worth doing before you send that launch email.

The pre-launch monitoring checklist

1. Core URL monitors

Homepage monitor — https://yourapp.com, expect 200, content check for app name Login / signup page — the page new users land on, content check for form element text Core API health endpoint — /health or /api/ping, expect 200, response time threshold 1000ms Checkout / payment page (if applicable) — the most revenue-critical URL, check it specifically

2. SSL certificate monitoring

SSL monitor for your primary domain — alert 30 days before expiry SSL monitor for app subdomain (e.g. app.yourcompany.com) if different from marketing site

3. Alert channels

Email alert configured — at minimum, your personal email gets notified on any downtime Slack or Discord alert (if you have a team channel) — faster visibility during working hours Phone alert configured (Telegram, PagerDuty, or webhook to SMS) for overnight critical incidents Test your alerts — use the notification test button to verify each channel actually receives messages

4. Status page

Create a public status page — add your core monitors, give them user-friendly names Add a link to the status page in your app footer, help docs, and support email signature Custom domain (optional, Pro+) — set up status.yourcompany.com via CNAME

5. Alert configuration

Failure threshold set to 2 on most monitors — avoid false positives from single-check blips Response time threshold set on your API health endpoint — catch degradation before users do Quiet hours configured for non-critical monitors (marketing site, docs) — don't wake up at 3am for the blog

6. Incident readiness

Know how to post a status page update — practice creating an incident and posting an update before a real one happens Have a rollback plan — know how to revert a bad deploy within 5 minutes Write a support email template for "we're currently experiencing issues" — don't compose it for the first time during an outage

What to add after launch

The above is the minimum viable monitoring setup. Once you have real users and traffic patterns, add:

Cron job / heartbeat monitors for any scheduled background tasks (email digests, data imports, payment retries)
Per-region monitoring if you have significant traffic from multiple geographies
Dependency monitors — if you use Stripe, Sendgrid, or other third-party APIs, consider monitoring their status pages
Performance regression testing — as you add features, watch for response time increases on your most critical endpoints

The goal of pre-launch monitoring isn't perfection — it's having enough visibility to know when something is wrong before your users do. The checklist above achieves that. Everything else can come later.

Set up monitoring before your first user arrives

PingBase's free tier covers everything in this checklist: 5 monitors, status page, alerts, SSL monitoring. Setup takes under 30 minutes.

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The Complete Monitoring Checklist for SaaS Founders

Deeper coverage: full monitoring setup beyond the basics.

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Why a public status page matters even for small products.

Alert Fatigue: How to Set Up Smart Notifications

Configure thresholds so your alerts are always worth acting on.