# How to Monitor Clerk Uptime

> Clerk provides authentication and user management for web and mobile apps: sign-in and sign-up flows, sessions, organizations and prebuilt UI components.

*Source: https://monitoristic.com/monitor/clerk*

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## Why Monitor Clerk?

Clerk keeps sessions secure by issuing session tokens that last about 60 seconds, which the frontend refreshes in the background roughly every 50 seconds. That design means signed-in users depend on Clerk continuously, not just at login: if your app can't reach Clerk, protected pages and API calls start failing almost immediately. Monitoring your sign-in flow and a protected route tells you the moment that happens.

## What to Monitor

- `your-app.com/sign-in` — Your sign-in page, where Clerk's components load; if it fails, nobody new can get in
- `your-app.com` — Your main page, to separate an app outage from an auth outage
- `your-app.com/api/health` — An app route that confirms your backend can verify Clerk sessions (for example, by loading Clerk's keys)

## What You Should Actually Do

1. Monitor your sign-in page; it's where Clerk's components load, and it's the first thing new and returning users hit
2. Add a protected health route in your backend that confirms it can verify Clerk sessions, and monitor it
3. Monitor your main page separately, so you can tell an app outage from an auth outage at a glance
4. Send alerts to your phone; because Clerk session tokens are short-lived, an auth problem affects signed-in users within about a minute
5. After rotating keys or changing domains in the Clerk Dashboard, watch your monitors for the next hour; auth misconfigurations often fail after caches expire
6. Check status.clerk.com during incidents, but remember it can't see your keys, domains or app configuration

## Clerk's Official Status Page

Clerk publishes real-time status at https://status.clerk.com. Your own monitor complements it by catching connection-level issues, often before the status page updates.

## Takeaway

Clerk handles authentication so you don't have to, and its short-lived tokens make sessions more secure. The trade-off is a continuous dependency: when your app can't reach Clerk, everyone notices fast. Monitoring sign-in and a protected route means you notice first.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Why does a Clerk problem affect users who are already signed in?

Clerk issues session tokens that last about 60 seconds and refreshes them in the background before they expire. If the refresh fails, the token runs out within a minute and protected requests start failing. That's good for security, and it's why auth monitoring needs short check intervals.

### What's the best way to monitor Clerk with an uptime monitor?

Monitor two things in your own app: the sign-in page (which loads Clerk's components) and a protected health route in your backend that confirms it can verify sessions. Together they cover the frontend and backend sides of authentication.

### Can I monitor Clerk's API directly?

Clerk's Backend API requires your secret key, which should never be stored in a third-party monitor. Monitoring your own routes that use Clerk is safer and more useful, because it tests the path your users actually take.

### How is this different from status.clerk.com?

Clerk's status page reports incidents on Clerk's platform. Your monitors catch problems on your side too: a rotated key, a domain change, a broken deploy of your sign-in page. Those never show up on a vendor status page.