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Monitoring: scenarios and alarms

I worked 2 years at New Relic, and I've been building frontends for more than two decades. So I know a thing or two about observability but should I bother? Regardless, I am still curious to know what's the landscape in 2023 for small website owners.

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Status some work to do

Find the minimum solution that could possibly work for knowing if there is trouble.

Requirements

  • simple to setup
  • notifications: at least an email
  • if using instrumentation
    • open-source client / kit
    • does not impact performance of site
    • does not capture any visitors data
  • no superfluous data that no one (me) will ever analyse

Nice to have: free service.

Scenarios to monitor

  • the domain can not be reached
  • not responding with the expected content (expected page is not there, empty, or fundamentally broken)
  • detect spikes of 404 (possibly, some content was lost or misplaced during coding, build or deployment)
  • detect client-side errors

Options

  • New Relic
  • Datadog
  • Sentry
  • 🚧
  • open source? self hosted? in the end it's a few functions and endpoints

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