Frontend hosting

Monitoring Netlify sites

Netlify is similar to Vercel in shape: auto-scaling frontend host with serverless functions. The monitoring concerns map roughly the same way — the main differences are around build state and form handling.

What to monitor

Production domain root URL

Monitor your apex domain as the canonical health check. If you serve from a custom domain rather than *.netlify.app, watch the canonical version that you publish publicly.

Netlify Functions endpoints

If your site uses Netlify Functions for forms, auth, or APIs, monitor at least one critical function endpoint directly. Cold starts can spike response time after long idle periods.

Form-handling endpoints

If you use Netlify Forms with a thank-you redirect, the form-action URL itself is part of your conversion path — worth monitoring even though it's an internal Netlify route.

Gotchas

Build failures don't take the site offline

A failed deploy doesn't replace the live site — Netlify just keeps serving the previous build. We can't detect this; you'll need Netlify's own deploy notifications. We'll detect it later when the live site starts behaving differently from staging.

Branch deploy URLs are noisy

Don't monitor preview deploy URLs — they get torn down when the branch is deleted, generating false-positive 'down' alerts.

Form spam can show up as response-time anomalies

If you're getting hammered by form spam, the form-handling function will run hot and our anomaly detector may flag a response-time spike. The fix is on the form side (CAPTCHA, honeypot), not on the monitoring side.

Setup steps

Add your Netlify production domain as a monitor.
Add critical Netlify Function endpoints as separate monitors.
Configure SSL alerts (Netlify auto-renews via Let's Encrypt; we'll alert if it ever fails).
Optional: separate monitor for the form-action URL if your conversion flow depends on it.

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