How to Know if My App Is Working
Set up uptime monitoring with a free tool like UptimeRobot, add basic error tracking with Sentry, and check your analytics dashboard for user activity. These three signals — uptime, errors, and traffic — tell you whether your app is working, broken, or somewhere in between.
Why this matters
If your app goes down and you do not know about it, your users find out before you do. For builders shipping their first app, the lack of visibility is one of the scariest parts — you deployed it, but you have no idea if it is actually working for real people.
What's at stake
An app that silently breaks loses users who never come back. Every hour of undetected downtime is lost trust, lost signups, and lost revenue. The builders who know their app is working are the ones who set up monitoring before launch, not after the first complaint.
Step by step.
Set up uptime monitoring
Create a free UptimeRobot account and add your app URL as an HTTP(s) monitor. Set the check interval to 5 minutes. Add your email as an alert contact. UptimeRobot will ping your app every 5 minutes and email you if it goes down.
Add basic error tracking
Create a free Sentry account and install the SDK for your framework (React, Next.js, etc.). Initialize Sentry in your app entry point with your project DSN. Sentry will capture unhandled errors and send them to your dashboard with full stack traces.
import * as Sentry from "@sentry/react";
Sentry.init({
dsn: "YOUR_SENTRY_DSN",
tracesSampleRate: 1.0,
});Check your analytics
Add a simple analytics tool like Vercel Analytics (if deployed on Vercel), PostHog (1M free events/month), or Plausible (self-hosted). Check daily for active users, page views, and any sudden drops that indicate something is broken.
Create a daily check habit
Spend 2 minutes each morning checking three things: (1) UptimeRobot dashboard shows green, (2) Sentry shows no new critical errors, (3) analytics shows expected traffic levels. This takes less time than making coffee and catches problems early.
Set up a public status page (optional)
UptimeRobot and Better Stack offer free public status pages. Share this URL with your users so they can check your app status themselves. This builds trust and reduces support requests during outages.
Know your app is working before your users tell you it is not
- Automated health monitoring that checks your app continuously
- Real-time alerts when something goes wrong
- Public status badge showing your app is actively maintained
Frequently asked questions.
Set up automated monitoring so you never have to manually check. UptimeRobot pings every 5 minutes on the free plan. Sentry alerts you to errors in real time. Your daily check should be a quick glance at dashboards, not a manual testing session.
Uptime monitoring checks if your app is reachable — is the URL responding? Error tracking checks if your app is working correctly — are there JavaScript errors, API failures, or crashes happening? You need both. An app can be "up" but full of errors.
Yes — especially for a small app. With few users, each one matters more. If your app goes down and your 50 users cannot access it, that is 100% of your users affected. Monitoring is free and takes 10 minutes to set up.
UptimeRobot (free) for uptime + Sentry (free tier, 5,000 errors/month) for error tracking. This covers the two most critical signals and takes under 15 minutes to configure. Add analytics later when you want to understand user behavior.