Monitoring for SaaS Companies: Beyond Simple Uptime Checks

If you are running a SaaS product, “is the website up?” is the bare minimum monitoring question. Your customers depend on your APIs, webhooks, background processing, and integrations working correctly around the clock. A comprehensive monitoring strategy is the difference between catching issues in seconds and finding out from angry customer support tickets.

Why SaaS Monitoring Is Different

SaaS products have unique monitoring challenges:

Multi-tenant architecture: An issue affecting one customer segment might not affect others
API-first design: Your API is the product, not just a website
Integration dependencies: You depend on (and are depended upon by) third-party services
Background processing: Queues, cron jobs, and async workflows run silently until they break
Global user base: Performance needs to be consistent across regions
SLA commitments: You have contractual uptime obligations

Traditional website monitoring catches maybe 20% of these concerns. Here is how to cover the rest.

The SaaS Monitoring Stack

1. API Endpoint Monitoring

Your API is your product’s interface with the world. Monitor it like the critical asset it is.

What to monitor:

Authentication endpoints (login, token refresh)
Core CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete)
Search and query endpoints
Webhook delivery endpoints
Public API endpoints (if you have a developer platform)

How to monitor effectively:

Do not just check for a 200 status code. Validate the response body:

{
  "type": "api",
  "name": "User API - List Users",
  "url": "https://api.example.com/v1/users",
  "method": "GET",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer ${MONITORING_API_KEY}"
  },
  "expectedStatus": 200,
  "expectedBody": "\"users\"",
  "maxResponseTime": 2000,
  "interval": 30
}

This catches scenarios where your API returns 200 but with an empty response, an error message in the body, or degraded performance.

2. GraphQL Monitoring

If your API uses GraphQL, standard HTTP monitoring is not enough. GraphQL always returns 200 (even for errors), so you need to validate the response payload.

query HealthCheck {
  currentUser {
    id
    email
  }
  systemStatus {
    database
    cache
    queue
  }
}

StatusApp’s GraphQL monitor type handles this natively — it sends your query and validates the response structure.

3. Webhook Delivery Monitoring

If your SaaS sends webhooks to customers (payment events, status updates, data sync), failed webhook delivery is a silent failure that customers notice before you do.

Use heartbeat monitoring for webhook processors:

// In your webhook delivery worker
async function processWebhook(event) {
  try {
    await deliverWebhook(event);
    // Ping StatusApp heartbeat after successful delivery
    await fetch('https://heartbeat.statusapp.io/YOUR_HEARTBEAT_ID');
  } catch (error) {
    handleFailure(event, error);
  }
}

If the heartbeat is not pinged within the expected interval, you know the webhook processor has stalled.

4. Background Job Monitoring

SaaS products rely on background jobs for billing, email sending, data processing, report generation, and more. These jobs fail silently.

Set up heartbeat monitors for each critical job:

Job	Expected Interval	Alert After
Billing processor	Every hour	90 minutes
Email digest	Daily at 9 AM	10 AM
Data export	On demand, max 4 hours	5 hours
Cache warmup	Every 15 minutes	20 minutes
Database backup	Daily at 2 AM	3 AM

5. SSL and Certificate Monitoring

An expired SSL certificate on your API endpoint means every customer integration breaks simultaneously. This is a company-wide incident. Monitor SSL certificates with alerts at 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration.

6. DNS Monitoring

DNS issues are notoriously difficult to debug in the moment. Monitor your DNS records:

A/AAAA records: Your primary domain and API subdomain
CNAME records: CDN and service aliases
MX records: If you use a custom domain for email
TXT records: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for email deliverability

7. Server and Infrastructure Monitoring

Even with managed cloud providers, you need visibility into:

CPU utilization: Sustained high CPU indicates scaling needs
Memory usage: Memory leaks accumulate slowly then crash suddenly
Disk usage: Log files and database storage grow over time
Network I/O: Traffic spikes and bandwidth limits

StatusApp’s server monitoring agent provides real-time visibility into these metrics from a lightweight process.

Building Your Status Page

Every SaaS company needs a public status page. It is where your customers check when something feels wrong, and it is where you communicate during incidents.

A good status page includes:

Component status: Break your service into components (API, Dashboard, Webhooks, Data Processing)
Current incidents: Real-time updates during issues
Uptime history: 90-day uptime visualization for each component
Subscriber notifications: Email/SMS alerts for subscribers

StatusApp includes status pages on all plans. You can connect it to a custom domain (status.yourapp.com) and embed it in your documentation.

SLA Monitoring and Reporting

Most SaaS contracts include uptime SLAs (commonly 99.9% or 99.95%). You need data to prove compliance.

SLA	Allowed Downtime (Monthly)	Allowed Downtime (Annual)
99.0%	7h 18m	3d 15h 36m
99.9%	43m 49s	8h 45m 57s
99.95%	21m 55s	4h 22m 58s
99.99%	4m 23s	52m 35s

StatusApp’s analytics track your actual uptime to the second, making SLA reporting straightforward. You can generate reports showing uptime by time period, region, and monitor.

Alert Strategy for SaaS

Who Gets Alerted?

On-call engineer: All critical alerts (PagerDuty or SMS)
Engineering team: High-priority alerts (Slack channel)
Support team: Customer-facing service degradation (email or Slack)
Management: Extended outages exceeding 15 minutes (email)

Alert Thresholds

Avoid alerting on every minor fluctuation:

Response time: Alert when p95 exceeds 2x normal, not on individual slow requests
Error rate: Alert when error rate exceeds 1%, not on single errors
Availability: Use confirmation checks (2-3 failures from different locations) before triggering

The Complete SaaS Monitoring Checklist

Here is what a comprehensive SaaS monitoring setup looks like:

StatusApp’s Business plan (500 monitors at $49/month) covers even complex SaaS architectures comfortably.

Build a monitoring setup your SaaS deserves. Start with StatusApp free and expand as you grow.