Black Friday monitoring prep for indie SaaS
Black Friday and Cyber Week spike traffic, payment webhooks, and support tickets — often on the same small stack that handled quiet Tuesdays all year. Monitoring is not load testing: it tells you when the production health URL stops returning 200, not whether you can survive 10× concurrent users.
StillOnline runs scheduled HTTP GET checks, publishes a status page, and alerts owners when probes fail. Before the rush, align maintenance windows, check intervals, and customer-facing copy so a planned deploy does not look like an accident — and a real outage gets you paged before Twitter does.
Quick answer
Adobe Analytics reported $10.8 billion in U.S. online spending on Black Friday 2024 — traffic and checkout pressure spike far above a normal weekday. StillOnline does not load test your app. Prep by posting scheduled maintenance on your status page before risky deploys, keeping five-minute probes (Free) on your canonical /health URL, and verifying Telegram or email owner alerts in settings. Scale capacity separately; use StillOnline for external truth and customer communication.
What StillOnline does and does not do
| Capability | Black Friday role |
|---|---|
| HTTP GET probes | Detect when health URL fails from outside |
| Status page + incidents | Planned maintenance + outage narrative |
| Owner alerts | You hear DOWN before support inbox explodes |
| Load / stress testing | Not included — use k6, Locust, or your host’s tools |
Treat monitoring as smoke from outside the building, not a capacity plan. If you need proof of headroom, run load tests in staging and watch infra metrics — then keep StillOnline pointed at production /health.
Two-week prep checklist
| When | Action |
|---|---|
| T−14 days | Confirm production /health is public, fast (<2 s), returns 200 — health design |
| T−7 days | Post scheduled maintenance for any schema or infra change — maintenance guide |
| T−3 days | Test owner alert path (Telegram bot, email) with a staging check or brief maintenance window |
| T−1 day | Freeze risky deploys; draft incident post and customer email templates |
| Peak days | Avoid optional deploys; resolve incidents quickly on the public timeline |
Maintenance windows vs probe colors
Customers read the status page; probes read your health URL. Align them on purpose.
| Scenario | Status page | Probes |
|---|---|---|
| Planned DB migration | Incident: Scheduled maintenance, start/end UTC | May go red briefly — say so in the body |
| Read-only mode | Degraded — logins work, exports slow | /health returns 200 with degraded copy, or 503 if you want red |
| Emergency hotfix | Investigating within minutes of alert | Honest red when /health fails |
StillOnline probes keep running during maintenance unless you change the target URL. Explain expected yellow/red in the incident text — subscribers and bookmarkers trust the timeline more than a silent color flip.
Check intervals and false alarms
Free and default Pro use five-minute intervals; two consecutive failures mark DOWN (~10 minutes). During volatile weeks:
| Tuning lever | Effect |
|---|---|
Lightweight /health | Fewer false reds from DB ping timeouts under load |
| Separate deep check (Pro) | Web liveness on one URL, DB on second — see multi-region strategy for geographic probe ideas |
| Incident cadence | Update public post every ~5–15 min during outages — cadence guide |
StillOnline will not tell you CPU is at 95% — your host dashboard will. Combine both: infra metrics for capacity, StillOnline for customer-visible availability.
Communication stack
- Status page URL in footer, checkout, and API docs before peak week.
- Scheduled maintenance post with UTC window before deploy night.
- Owner alerts on — accidental DOWN during “we thought it was fine” deploys is common on sale days.
- Customer email only for sustained or billing-impacting outages — template: customer email during outage.
Register or audit in StillOnline
- Dashboard → confirm check targets production HTTPS, not staging.
- Verify expected status code 200 (or your contract).
- Open public status page — link matches what support already sends.
- Pro teams: split marketing site vs API health if checkout depends on a different host — up to 10 URLs per project (pricing).
Related guides
- Scheduled maintenance on your status page
- Incident post template for SaaS
- Customer email during an outage template
- Multi-region health check strategy
FAQ
Does StillOnline load test my SaaS for Black Friday traffic?
No. StillOnline performs scheduled HTTP GET checks on URLs you register. Capacity planning requires separate load tools and host metrics.
Should I pause StillOnline checks during maintenance?
Usually no — keep probes running and explain planned downtime in a scheduled maintenance incident. Pausing checks hides accidental failures during the same window.
Is a five-minute StillOnline interval enough on Cyber Monday?
For “is the app reachable from the internet?” yes — that is the product’s job. Sub-minute detection of latency spikes is not what HTTP uptime probes optimize for; watch APM and infra alongside StillOnline.
Can StillOnline alert my team on Black Friday without a status page?
Yes. Owner Telegram, Slack, or email alerts fire on DOWN even if you never share the public page — but customers still need a link when checkout breaks; publish the page before peak traffic.