Should I monitor the APIs I depend on, not just my own site?
Q: My app is up but breaks when a payment provider or auth service goes down. Worth monitoring those separately?
A: Absolutely, and here's why with numbers. A SaaS reader only monitored their own endpoints. When their email-sending provider had a partial outage, signups silently failed at the verification step for 70 minutes. Their own monitors stayed green — the app was fine, the dependency wasn't. They lost an estimated 90 trial signups before a customer complained.
They added synthetic checks against each critical third party: payment, email, auth, and search. When the next provider degraded, the dependency check flagged it in 3 minutes, and they flipped on a maintenance banner before users hit the wall.
The follow-up: tag these alerts clearly as 'external.' The on-call response is different — you can't fix the vendor, but you can fail gracefully, show a banner, or switch to a backup provider. Knowing instantly that it's external saves wasted debugging.
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Should I monitor the APIs I depend on, not just my own site?
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