Classic monitoring answers one question: is the server up? But HTTP 200 says nothing about whether a visitor can actually buy. A store can load quickly, show the homepage and still have a broken purchase path.
The trap of everything looks green
Many revenue incidents do not look like outages. The payment page loads, but the button no longer submits. The cart empties after add-to-cart. A payment method silently disappears. The confirmation page never appears. Uptime stays green while sales stop.
What to monitor instead
Instead of pinging one URL, monitor the steps that take revenue:
- product page and add-to-cart
- cart and checkout flow
- payment methods and 3DS
- confirmation and post-purchase signals
When one of these steps breaks, the right response is not a generic site-down alert. It is a precise alert with likely cause and incident proof.
Detect early, prove, act
The earlier a conversion incident is detected, the less it costs. CashFlowCanary watches these journeys continuously, opens an incident when a signal breaks and produces shareable proof so the team can act quickly.