Your App is Live. Now What If It Breaks?

Congrats! Your app is live. Users are signing up. Everything seems to be working.

Then you wake up to this:

You check. They're right. The login endpoint has been returning 500 errors for days.

But you had no idea.

Why? Because you don't have monitoring set up. No error tracking. No alerts. You're flying blind.

Here's how to fix that in 15 minutes.

Why Monitoring Matters (The Real Cost)

Let's be honest about what happens when you launch without monitoring:

Scenario 1: Silent Failures

A payment fails. The user thinks they paid. You think they didn't. They get angry. You lose the customer and get a bad review.

Scenario 2: The Slow Bleed

Your signup form breaks. New users see an error and leave. Signups drop from 50/day to 0. You don't notice until a week later when you check analytics. That's 350 lost users.

Scenario 3: The Crash Nobody Reported

20% of users are on a specific phone model that triggers a crash. They try once, it fails, they uninstall. You never hear from them. You just see your retention numbers tank.

All of these are preventable with basic monitoring.

What You Actually Need to Track

Forget the fancy enterprise monitoring jargon. Here's what actually matters for a new app:

1. Error Tracking (The Most Important One)

What it does: Captures every error that happens in your app, shows you the code that caused it, and alerts you immediately.

Why you need it: You can't fix problems you don't know about. When users hit errors, you need to know:

• What error happened
• Which user hit it
• What they were doing
• Which line of code broke

Best tools:

How to Set Up Sentry (5 Minutes)

Step 1: Sign up at sentry.io (free)

Step 2: Create a new project (pick your framework: React, Node.js, Python, etc.)

Step 3: Install their library:

Step 4: Add this to your app:

That's it. Now every error automatically gets logged, and you get email alerts.

2. Uptime Monitoring

What it does: Pings your app every few minutes to make sure it's still alive. Alerts you if it goes down.

Why you need it: If your server crashes or your hosting provider has an outage, you want to know immediately—not when users start complaining.

Best tools:

3. Basic Analytics

What it does: Shows you how many users you have, what pages they visit, where they drop off.

Why you need it: If signups suddenly drop to zero, you want to know today—not next month when you check Google Analytics.

Best tools:

What You DON'T Need (Yet)

Don't overwhelm yourself. You don't need these until you have thousands of users:

• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): New Relic, DataDog—too complex and expensive for new apps
• Log aggregation: ELK stack, Splunk—overkill unless you have a huge app
• Custom dashboards: Grafana, Kibana—fun to build but a time sink
• Session replay: LogRocket, FullStory—useful but expensive

Start simple. Add complexity only when you actually need it.

The 3 Alerts That Matter

Set up these 3 alerts, and you'll catch 95% of problems:

1. Error Rate Spike

"Alert me when errors go above 10 per hour"

Catches: Bugs in new releases, third-party service outages

2. Downtime

"Alert me if the app doesn't respond for 1 minute"

Catches: Server crashes, hosting issues

3. Critical Errors

"Alert me immediately for 500 errors or payment failures"

Catches: Database issues, payment processing problems

How to set alerts: Sentry and BetterUptime both have built-in alerting. Configure email or Slack notifications in settings.

Quick Setup Checklist

Here's your 15-minute monitoring setup:

1. Error Tracking (5 min):
   • Sign up for Sentry
   • Install library
   • Add initialization code
   • Deploy
2. Uptime Monitoring (3 min):
   • Sign up for BetterUptime
   • Add your app's URL
   • Configure email alerts
3. Analytics (5 min):
   • Sign up for Plausible or add Google Analytics
   • Add tracking script to your app
   • Verify it's working
4. Test (2 min):
   • Trigger a test error (throw new Error("test"))
   • Check if Sentry captured it
   • Verify you got an alert

What Good Monitoring Feels Like

Before monitoring:

• You're anxious about users hitting bugs
• You refresh analytics obsessively
• You only learn about problems from angry users
• You spend weekends stress-testing the app

After monitoring:

• You get instant alerts when something breaks
• You see exactly what went wrong and can fix it fast
• You sleep better knowing you'll know if there's a problem
• You can focus on building instead of worrying

The Bottom Line

Launching without monitoring is like driving blindfolded. Sure, you might make it—but why risk it?

Three tools. 15 minutes. Peace of mind.

1. Sentry for error tracking
2. BetterUptime for downtime alerts
3. Plausible for user analytics

Your future self (and your users) will thank you.