How to Monitor Everything That’s Not Just Your App (DNS, Email, APIs, DBs…)

Most devs monitor one thing:

Is my app up?

And while that’s a good start — it’s just the tip of the stack.

If you’re not monitoring the services around your app, you’re flying blind.

Here’s what I mean — and how to fix it 👇

💥 What You're Probably Not Monitoring (Yet)

• DNS outages (users can't resolve your domain = you're offline)

• Email delivery failures (SMTP down = no password resets)

• Third-party APIs (Stripe, OpenAI, Auth0, etc.)

• Database connectivity

• Port availability (especially for self-hosted services)

• Keyword responses (check for specific phrases in API/HTML)

• SSL certificate expiration

Each of these can cause downtime even if your app is 100% up.

⚙️ How I Monitor All of This (Without 5 Tools)

I use Garmingo Status — it lets me monitor way more than just “is my website up?”

Here’s what I’ve set up:

• ✅ HTTP/HTTPS checks for frontend & backend

• ✅ Ping & Port checks for internal services

• ✅ DNS monitoring (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX…)

• ✅ Keyword checks (e.g. “OK”, “200 OK”, login form present)

• ✅ Certificate monitoring

• ✅ Uptime + incident logs

• ✅ Public status page for transparency

It takes minutes to configure, and it’s all in one place.

🧠 Why It Matters

You can’t fix what you’re not watching.

The worst kind of outage is the one where:

• Everything looks fine on your end…

• …but users are still getting 404s or no emails.

Don’t let silent failures wreck your reliability.

🎁 Want to See It in Action?

Garmingo Status has a forever free plan

(no credit card, no vendor lock-in).

It lets you monitor everything around your app — not just the app itself.

👉 https://garmingo.com/status#free-demo

Curious: What’s the weirdest thing you monitor?

Let me know in the comments 👇