Better Stack checks your endpoints every 30 seconds from multiple global locations. When something goes down, it alerts you via Slack, SMS, or phone call within 60 seconds. Set up a public status page too — it reduces support tickets by 30%.

Sentry captures every exception in your app with full context: stack trace, user info, breadcrumbs of what happened before the error. Set up alerts for new error types and error rate spikes. You'll know about bugs before users file tickets.

Define escalation policies: if the primary person doesn't acknowledge in 5 minutes, it goes to the next person. Set severity levels — not every error needs a 3am phone call. PagerDuty integrates with Better Stack and Sentry out of the box.

Decide how reliable you need to be. 99.9% uptime = 8.7 hours downtime/year. Track this in your monitoring tool. SLOs give you a framework for deciding when to prioritize reliability over features — Google's SRE book (free online) explains this brilliantly.

When things break, you need searchable logs. Better Stack Logs or Axiom ingest your application and server logs, let you search in real-time, and create alerts on log patterns. Much faster than SSH-ing into servers and grepping through files.