Notes on API and vendor monitoring
Uptime checks, incident response, SLA tracking, and the parts of vendor monitoring that actually matter when something breaks.
91 articles · page 10 of 10
Vendor Risk Assessment for SaaS: Evaluate Reliability Before You Commit
Choosing a cloud vendor without assessing reliability risk is like hiring without a reference check. Here's a practical framework for evaluating third-party reliability before you build on it.
How to Stand Up a War Room in 60 Seconds During a Vendor Outage
When a vendor goes down, the first 60 seconds determine how fast you recover. Here's the exact war room setup sequence that eliminates the 'who does what' confusion at the worst possible moment.
Circuit Breakers for Third-Party APIs: A Developer's Guide
When a third-party API degrades, your application shouldn't degrade with it. Here's how to implement circuit breakers that protect your users from cascading failures during vendor outages.
When Third-Party Downtime Eats Your Error Budget: An SRE Guide
A 2-hour vendor outage can consume your entire monthly error budget without a single line of your code failing. Here's how SREs should account for, attribute, and respond to externally caused budget burns.
Postmortem Template for Third-Party Outages: When It Wasn't Your Fault
Most postmortem templates assume you caused the outage. Here's a template built specifically for third-party incidents, covering attribution, blast radius, resilience gaps, and vendor accountability.
Slack Alerting Done Right: Route Cloud Alerts Without Drowning Your Team
Most Slack alert setups start clean and end in chaos. Here's the channel architecture, routing rules, and naming conventions that keep cloud service alerts actionable, even at scale.
Is Your Vendor's Status Page Lying? How to Find Out
Vendor status pages show green more often than reality warrants. Here's how to verify vendor-reported status against independent monitoring data, and what to do when they don't match.
The Hidden Cost of Single-Vendor Dependency in Cloud Architecture
A single payment processor. A single authentication provider. A single cloud region. Single-vendor lock-in is cheap until it isn't. Here's how to quantify the risk and where to invest in redundancy first.
How to Present Cloud Reliability Data to Non-Technical Stakeholders
P95 latency and MTTR mean nothing to a CFO. Here's how to translate cloud reliability data into business-impact language that earns budget for the resilience investments your team needs.