PLAYBOOK: Building a feed-death early-warning system

PLAYBOOK: Building a feed-death early-warning system
We hear the best operators never learn about a dead feed from a traffic drop. The monitoring stack they wire up once:
— Cron-pull each merchant feed daily; alert on HTTP non-200, byte-size drop over 50%, or product count crash
— Track 'last successful parse' per merchant — a feed returning 200 but empty XML is the silent killer
— Add a checkout-canary: a scheduled test that applies your top code per merchant and flags failures
— Route alerts to a channel, not email — feed deaths need a same-hour response, not a next-morning read
Why it matters: a feed that 200s with zero products won't trip a uptime check but will gut your pages. Monitor product count, not just status code.