Before getting into specific recommendations, it is worth separating the two distinct threats that network admins need to monitor for, because most tools handle one well and the other poorly.

Resolution failures are operational. A nameserver goes down. A zone transfer breaks. A record expires. A propagation delay means half your users i...

Without Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring, your digital experience monitoring (DEM) stack can't detect the route hijacks, leaks, or instability that prevent users from reaching your applications. Most DEM stacks miss this entirely, and that gap is where some of the most damaging, hardest-to-diagnose outages happen.

Every plan...

Most of the time, the culprit is invisible: a broken DNS record. When DNS works, nobody notices. But when it breaks, everything breaks — regardless of how healthy your infrastructure is underneath.

DNS breaks more often than most teams expect. Yet many teams still find out about DNS failures from users, not dashboards.

A multi-homed website is hosted behind servers connected to two or more internet providers, each with its own IP address. DNS rotates traffic between those IPs—and that rotation is exactly what makes standard monitoring unreliable.

Think of it this way: your monitoring tool checks "yourwebsite.com," DNS picks an IP at random, an...

HTTP status codes are the foundation of REST monitoring. Each endpoint maps to a specific resource—GET /users, POST /orders, DELETE /sessions—and returns a code that communicates the outcome: 2xx for success, 4xx for client errors, 5xx for server failures. You monitor each route independently, set alerting thresholds per endpoint, and aggrega...

There was a version of daily life, not long ago, that ran entirely on physical effort. Booking a trip meant a visit to a travel agent. Ordering lunch meant walking to a restaurant or calling and hoping someone picked up. Buying something for the home meant a trip to the store and a checkout queue. Paying a bill meant visiting a bank branch an...

Rizzy works nights for ZylkerXchange, Zylker’s foreign currency exchange app. He lives on the city’s outskirts, where the air is clean and quiet, and the night shift suited that life. Most nights, nothing happened. Some nights, everything did.

For two years, Rizzy’s shift followed the same pattern. An alert fired, then usually three or ...

An API returning 200 OK can still be broken—wrong payload, a four-second P95, an expired certificate quietly downgraded to HTTP. Postman's State of the API 2024 report found that 58% of API failures are first reported by end users. If your customers are your alerting mechanism, you're not monitoring correctly.

These 15 rules cov...