DevOps Services
Who notices first when your app goes down?
If your first outage alert is a customer email, the alert is in the wrong place. We watch your app around the clock and get the alert first.
Most teams start with the free AWS bill check. Once the bill is down, we review the rest of your setup for free, and this is one of the things we can take on. How the steps work
The first alert is a customer email
It is Sunday evening. Your app stopped answering at 4:10pm. Nobody on the team noticed, because nothing was set up to tell them. At 6:45pm a customer writes in: "Is something wrong? We can't log in." (example)
For many small teams that is how outages get found. There may be a dashboard somewhere with graphs on it, but a graph only helps if someone is looking at it at the right moment.
Monitoring means checking your app from the outside on a schedule and raising an alert when it stops answering or starts slowing down.
What could happen
- Hours of downtime nobody sees. A server fills its disk overnight and the app stops saving data. The first person to notice is the first customer to try.
- A launch or campaign lands on a broken page. You pay for traffic to a signup page that has been returning errors since lunchtime.
- Slow decay instead of a clean outage. Pages get a little slower each week as the database grows. Nothing "breaks," but conversion drops and support tickets rise.
- An expired certificate or domain. The browser shows a security warning to every visitor. It takes five minutes to fix and can cost a full day of signups if nobody is watching the date.
- Alerts that go nowhere. Monitoring was set up once and the alerts go to a former employee, or to a channel everyone muted months ago.
The cost isn't only the hours down. It is the customer who decides you are not reliable enough for their team.
What we do, step by step
- Map what matters. Software lists your public pages, login, API endpoints, background jobs and the servers behind them. A senior engineer agrees with you which of these must never go quiet, and which can wait until Monday.
- Check from outside, around the clock. We test your app from several locations every few minutes, the same way a customer would reach it, including logging in where it makes sense.
- Watch the slow problems too. Disk space, database size, memory, certificate and domain expiry dates. These rarely fail all at once, so we alert while there is still time.
- Filter before anyone is woken up. Our tooling groups related alerts and drops known noise, so one failure doesn't send fifty messages. A senior engineer tunes the rules during the first weeks, so an alert means something.
- The alert comes to us first. When something stops answering, we get it, confirm it is real, and tell you in plain words what is down and what we are doing. On Operate, we also handle the fix.
- Monthly report. Uptime per check, every incident with cause and duration, and the warnings we acted on before they became outages.
What you can do yourself today
- Sign up for any free external uptime checker and point it at your homepage, your login page and one API endpoint. It takes about fifteen minutes.
- Send the alerts to a phone, not only to email. Test it once by pointing a check at a page that doesn't exist.
- Write down the expiry dates of your domain and your certificates, and set calendar reminders 30 days before each.
- Check disk usage on your main servers. Anything over 80% full deserves a look this week.
- Decide who is first to respond on weekends. "Whoever sees it" usually means nobody until Monday.
What's included in which plan
| Guard $700/mo | Watch $1,200/mo | Operate $2,800/mo | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Certificate and domain expiry watch | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Security monitoring and alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Uptime checks, alerts to us first | No | Yes | Yes |
| Disk and database capacity watch | No | Yes | Yes |
| Incident handling when something breaks | No | No | Yes |
Guard and Watch start with a one-time setup of $1,500. Operate setup is quoted after the free review. Month to month, no exit fee. See all plans.
On Watch, we see the problem first and tell you what is happening. On Operate, we also fix it, with the same engineer who knows your setup.
Free AWS bill check
Want us to read your AWS bill?
Read-only access. In 48 hours, every dollar you could stop paying, ranked. You keep the report.
Questions about monitoring
We already have a monitoring tool. Why would we need this?
Many teams do. The usual gap is not the tool, it is who reads it and what happens next. If your alerts go to someone who answers within minutes at 2am on a Saturday, you may not need us for this part. The free review shows what you have and where it sends alerts.
Are you on call around the clock?
Our checks run around the clock and alerts reach us at any hour. We are a small senior team and we tell you up front which response times we commit to for your plan. If you need a large team on call around the clock today, we say so and we are not the right fit.
Will we get flooded with alerts?
No. Filtering the noise is part of the job. You hear from us when something real is down or about to fail, with a short note on what it is.
Do you need access to our servers for this?
Outside checks only need your public addresses. Disk and database checks need read access, which you grant and can remove at any time.
How we work with your systems
You stay in control
Read-only access first
The free bill check needs read access and nothing else. Nothing in your systems changes.
You approve every change
Each change comes as a short written note first: what, why, and how to undo it.
Your data and billing stay yours
Everything stays in your own account. We never become your billing contact.
Every action logged
Every action we take is logged, and the log is visible to you.
One-click access removal
Delete the access role and our access ends at once, with no penalty.
Month to month
There is no minimum term and no exit fee. Stop at the end of any month.
Your free AWS bill check, in 48 hours
One read-only template. Every dollar you could stop paying, ranked. You keep the report even if you never hire us.
read-only accessno savings, no feemonth to month
