This time last year, I showed the internet a little prototype uptime checker I built using Next.js as the frontend, with services running on AWS Lambda. I gave myself one week to put it together. I wrote a few articles about how the business was going throughout the year: The gist of my approach is as follows: I started with a single Lambda function that checks if static websites were still online, added an email alert if it's offline, wrapped authentication around it, integrated Stripe, and shipped it.

Jumping into monitoring software for the first time can be pretty overwhelming. If you're not in an exploring mood, it can be easy to get lost, and you're not entirely sure what all these knobs and buttons do. To help lighten this feeling for OnlineOrNot, I thought it might be useful to let folks know how I use OnlineOrNot, to monitor OnlineOrNot (as part of running OnlineOrNot day to day). Also, our friends at DebugBear wrote a similar article about how DebugBear uses DebugBear to keep their site fast.