On May 18 we launched Vigilmon — an uptime and website monitoring service for developers and indie makers who want to know when their sites go down before their users do. Since then, we've been heads-down building in public.
Here's every feature we shipped in the first 30 days.
🔍 Core Monitoring
1. Response time tracking — Every check now records and displays response time so you can catch performance degradation before it becomes an outage.
2. Incident history log — A full incident log with start/end timestamps and duration. See exactly when things broke and when they recovered.
3. SSL certificate expiry alerts — Vigilmon displays your cert's expiry date on the dashboard and status page and alerts you before it lapses. No more surprise cert failures.
4. Heartbeat / cron-job monitoring — If your cron job doesn't ping us on schedule, we alert you. No more silent cron failures destroying your data pipeline at 3 AM.
5. TCP/port monitoring — Monitor raw TCP connectivity on any port, not just HTTP. Useful for databases, mail servers, Redis, game servers — anything that listens on a port.
6. Response content checks — Configure a keyword that must appear in the response body. Case-insensitive matching. If your "Checkout" button disappears from your homepage, you'll know immediately.
7. Configurable check intervals — Choose 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minute intervals per monitor depending on how critical the endpoint is. High-traffic APIs get 1-minute checks; staging environments get hourly.
8. 90-day uptime chart — Public status pages now show a rolling 90-day uptime bar chart. Cached for performance, looks great on your status page.
🔔 Alerting
9. Slack (Block Kit format) — Upgraded Slack notifications to Block Kit with color sidebars — red for down, green for recovery. Actionable context instead of raw JSON.
10. Webhook notifications — Send alert payloads to any HTTPS endpoint. Build your own integrations: PagerDuty, OpsGenie, your custom incident bot.
11. Discord alerts — A native Discord webhook channel. Alerts land directly in your #ops channel.
12. Telegram bot — Telegram bot notifications. Send alerts to yourself or a group chat. Popular with our European users.
13. Email alert improvements — Alert subjects now include the monitor name and status. Each email links directly to the incident on your dashboard — one click to the context you need.
14. Alert escalation rules — If a monitor is still down after N minutes, escalate to a secondary contact. No more "was anyone notified?" post-mortems after an incident.
15. Webhook delivery history — Every webhook attempt is logged with status code, response body, and duration. You can debug a failed delivery without any guesswork.
16. Maintenance windows — Schedule planned downtime windows so alerts don't fire while you're deploying. No more 2 AM false alarms during your release.
17. Monthly uptime report emails — Automated monthly summary with uptime % per monitor. Forward to your manager or include in your SLA report.
18. Welcome email — New users get a proper onboarding email with their first steps instead of landing in an empty app.
🖥️ Dashboard UX
19. Dashboard redesign — Summary stats (monitors up/down, incidents today), a monitor grid with at-a-glance status indicators, and a live incident feed.
20. Monitor tags — Tag monitors by project, environment, or team (production, staging, api, frontend). Filter by tag on the dashboard. Scales when you have 50+ monitors.
21. Improved onboarding — First-time users now see a guided empty-state instead of a blank dashboard. We cut time-to-first-monitor by 60%.
🛠️ Developer Tools
22. Personal API tokens — Generate API tokens (prefixed vtk_) from account settings and manage monitors programmatically.
23. REST API — Full /api/v1/monitors REST API — CRUD, status checks, incidents. Documented at vigilmon.online/docs/api.
24. Custom HTTP request headers — Specify request headers per monitor. Useful for bearer tokens, X-Api-Key headers, or bypassing WAF rules on your staging environment.
25. SVG status badges — Embed a live status badge into your README or documentation. Updates in real-time. One line of Markdown.
26. API documentation page — A dedicated /docs/api reference with endpoint tables, example requests, and token instructions.
📈 Marketing & SEO
27. Comparison pages — /compare/vigilmon-vs-pingdom, /compare/vigilmon-vs-uptimerobot, and more. Targeting the "alternative to X" search queries.
28. Technical SEO — Sitemap, robots.txt, canonical tags, meta descriptions across all public pages, and structured data for rich snippets.
29. Dev.to tutorial articles — Published tutorials on monitoring Laravel, Node.js, and Next.js apps with Vigilmon. These drive organic discovery.
30. Directory submissions — Listed on BetaList, Product Hunt upcoming, and several developer tool directories.
What we learned about prioritization
After 30 days and 36+ shipped features, three lessons stick:
1. Monitoring features compound
Each new check type (TCP, heartbeat, content checks) multiplies the number of things users can monitor. We should have shipped these earlier instead of polishing the dashboard first. The breadth of coverage is what makes a monitoring tool worth paying for.
2. Alerting IS the product
Users don't open dashboards when things are fine. They care about: Was I notified? How fast? Was the notification actionable? Investing in webhook delivery history, escalation rules, and channel diversity had higher impact than we expected. The dashboard is a nice-to-have; the alert is the whole point.
3. Docs unlock API adoption
We shipped the REST API and got zero integrations. We shipped the docs page and got three integrations in a week. Documentation is a feature, not a follow-up task.
What's next
Show HN launch — We're preparing our Hacker News post. Watch this space or follow along on Dev.to.
Stripe payments — Paid plans are nearly ready. The free tier (3 monitors, 5-minute checks) will always exist.
Broken link detection — Crawl your site, find dead links before Google does, get a digest report.
Status page customization — Custom domain support and branding for your public status page.
Try Vigilmon
vigilmon.online — free tier, no credit card required. Add your first monitor in under 60 seconds.
If you're also building in public, drop a comment with your project — I'd love to follow along.
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