Production Monitoring

Production breaks at 2am. Who finds out first?

A 200 OK does not mean checkout, signup, or billing still works. Keep the business-critical journeys running after merge so your team finds the regression before support does.

Who this is for

Role
Engineering lead or SRE
Company
SaaS teams shipping daily with no dedicated QA or on-call coverage gaps
Trigger
Customer reports a broken checkout, sign-in fails over a weekend, or a third-party API change slips through staging

This is for you if:

  • Revenue-critical flows that would cost money if broken for an hour
  • Currently relying on synthetic monitoring that only checks page loads
  • Have experienced production incidents discovered by customers, not monitoring
  • Ship daily or more frequently, increasing deployment regression risk
  • No dedicated SRE team to build and maintain custom smoke tests

The pain is real

“We found out a critical purchase path was broken because a customer tweeted about it. That was a bad Monday.”

Engineering lead, Series B fintechsource

“Synthetic monitoring tells us the homepage loads. It doesn't tell us if a user can actually complete a purchase.”

SRE, e-commerce platformsource

“Our staging environment is a lie. Half the bugs that hit production are from things that work perfectly in staging.”

CTO, B2B SaaSsource

68% of production outages are discovered by users, not monitoring (Slack State of Incidents)

Third-party API failures account for 35% of user-facing incidents

Mean time to detection for checkout failures: 47 minutes without E2E monitoring

Why nobody else solves this

Synthetic monitoring (Datadog, Pingdom) checks if pages load, not if user flows work

Uptime monitoring misses functional regressions entirely — your site is ‘up’ but checkout is broken

Building custom production smoke tests requires maintaining a separate test suite from CI

Most teams only run E2E tests pre-merge, leaving production unmonitored between deploys

The workflow today vs. with Zerocheck

Without Zerocheck

A third-party dependency changes behavior on a Saturday. Your checkout page loads fine because Pingdom says 200 OK, but the purchase flow is broken. A customer emails support on Monday morning. The on-call engineer spends 2 hours debugging. Revenue lost: 36 hours of failed checkouts.

With Zerocheck

Zerocheck runs approved critical tests against production after a production URL is configured. At 2:14am Saturday, an approved checkout smoke test fails. The Slack alert includes the recording, screenshots, and step trace the team needs to fix the regression before the next business day.

How it works

1

Keep approved critical journeys running against production

2

Use tighter schedules for revenue paths and quieter schedules for lower-risk checks

3

Confirm failures before waking the team

4

Alert Slack with browser evidence engineers can act on

5

Keep a record of what failed, when, and what the browser saw

FAQ

How is this different from Datadog Synthetics or Pingdom?

Synthetic monitors check if a page loads or an API returns 200. Zerocheck runs approved browser tests against real user flows such as checkout smoke, sign-in, onboarding, and billing. It catches functional regressions that synthetic pings miss entirely.

Won’t production tests create real data?

Use dedicated test accounts and non-destructive approved flows. Production monitoring tests should observe critical functionality without using real payment data or destructive account actions.

How do you handle flaky alerts?

Keep production monitors to approved, high-signal critical flows and use the run evidence to separate a real broken journey from a transient network issue. The alert should show what the browser saw, not just that a check failed.

What’s the performance impact on production?

Zerocheck runs a real browser against your production URL, similar to a single user session. Use dedicated test accounts and non-destructive flows so monitoring verifies the journey without creating business data or load surprises.

Production breaks at 2am. Who finds out first?

Your CI passed. Your PR merged. Do not wait for customers to discover the regression.

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