The debt you take on when a customer tells you first
An outage costs what it costs. Being informed of it by the person it happened to costs something separate, it accrues, and it is charged against the next incident rather than this one.
Product
Everything in The Nest tagged Product.
Set it up in an afternoon and then stop
Adopting monitoring for a small site is five decisions, not a project. Here is what each one actually involves, and why finishing a rough version beats designing a perfect one.
A status page is a sales asset, if it is honest
Uptime nobody can see is an internal fact. Published with real history, it answers a question buyers were going to ask anyway — and an always-green page nobody believes is worth less than an honest one with incidents on it.
Knowing before your customers do is the whole product
Monitoring is usually justified as insurance against downtime. The better argument is commercial: the gap between a customer telling you your site is broken and you telling them is a gap they can feel.
Thirty-one checks, one grid
HarpyWatch runs thirty-one distinct kinds of check against a site — not thirty-one variations on an HTTP request. Here is the full list, what each one is actually for, and why they share a single screen.