How to Detect Third-Party Outages Before Your Users Do
Your users are not your monitoring system. Here's how to get detection coverage that surfaces third-party incidents in time to act — before the support tickets arrive.
·7 min read
Incident Response
14 articles tagged "Incident Response"
How to Detect When a Third-Party API Is Degraded (Not Just Down)
Full outages are easy to detect. Partial degradation — when a service is responding but not reliably — is harder and more common. Here's how to recognize the signals, and why catching them is harder than it looks.
·11 min read
How to Handle Rate Limiting From Third-Party APIs in Production
Rate limits are one of the most common production failures caused by third-party APIs. Here's how to detect them early, implement proper backoff, and build systems that degrade gracefully when you hit the ceiling.
·8 min read
How to Write a Postmortem When a Third-Party Service Causes an Outage
Third-party outages are tricky to postmortem because you didn't control the failure. Here's how to write a useful postmortem that builds resilience — even when the root cause was someone else's infrastructure.
·10 min read
What to Do When a Vendor Has No Status Page
Not every vendor publishes a public status page. Here's how to get visibility into the operational health of dependencies that tell you nothing — and why building that visibility yourself rarely scales.
·10 min read
How to Keep Deployments Moving When GitHub Actions Is Down
GitHub Actions outages can freeze your entire release cycle. Here's how to detect them immediately, keep work flowing, and build CI/CD pipelines resilient to upstream platform failures.
·9 min read
How to Know If an API Is Down or Your Code Is Broken
When API calls fail, the hardest question is: is it them or is it you? Here's a systematic approach to diagnosing third-party API failures fast, before you waste an hour debugging working code.
·10 min read
How to Protect Revenue When Your Payment Processor Goes Down
Stripe, Paddle, or Braintree going down doesn't have to mean lost revenue. Here's how to detect payment processor outages early, communicate clearly with customers, and minimize the damage.
·9 min read
How to Reduce Mean Time to Detect Third-Party Service Failures
The longer it takes to discover that Stripe or AWS is down, the more customers hit broken experiences. Here's how production engineering teams minimize the gap between when a vendor incident starts and when your team knows about it.
·11 min read
How to Set Up Third-Party Service Alerts Without Creating Noise
Too many alerts trains your team to ignore them. Too few means you find out about outages from support tickets. Here's how to configure third-party service monitoring alerts that are actually useful.
·10 min read
How to Build an Incident Runbook for Third-Party Service Failures
When Stripe or AWS goes down at 2 AM, your on-call engineer shouldn't be Googling what to do. A well-written third-party outage runbook turns a scramble into a 5-minute response. Here's how to build one.
·9 min read
What Vendor SLAs Don't Tell You About Actual Reliability
A 99.9% SLA sounds solid. It allows 8.7 hours of downtime per year, and that downtime could happen all at once on your worst day. Here's how to track actual reliability rather than contractual promises.
·10 min read
Why Your App Goes Down Even When Your Own Infrastructure Is Fine
Your servers are healthy. Your database is responding. Your own metrics look clean. But your users are getting errors. The culprit is almost always a silent failure upstream. Here's what to look for.
·10 min read
How to Monitor Third-Party APIs and SaaS Dependencies (Developer Guide)
Every app depends on third-party APIs. Here is how to monitor them properly — with alerts, runbooks, and the tools that actually work — so outages stop surprising your team.
·8 min read