What Happens on Your Team
The Full-Stack Developer
Checks the Convex dashboard logs and sees the same error repeating since the last deploy. Rolls back, and the app springs back to life. Then wonders how long it was broken before the first user complaint.
The real cost: Reactive apps fail softly: loading spinners instead of error pages. That's a nicer experience during a blip, and a terrible one during an outage nobody knows about.
What they should have had: A health HTTP action that runs a quick query, monitored every few minutes. A broken deploy turns the check red within one interval of going live.
The Startup CTO
A payment provider's webhooks have been failing against a Convex HTTP action for hours. The provider's retries eventually give up, and orders get stuck in 'pending'.
The real cost: Convex doesn't automatically retry HTTP actions that error, so the caller's retry policy is all you've got. Once a third party stops retrying, those events are gone unless you replay them by hand.
What they should have had: A monitor on the webhook route (or a health route in the same code path), with alerts to the team. Failures show up while the provider is still retrying, when there's time to fix and recover.
The Product Manager
Hears from a customer that the app 'stopped updating' yesterday afternoon. Asks engineering how long it lasted. Nobody knows.
The real cost: Without uptime history, you can't answer basic questions after an incident: how long, how many users, did it happen before? Every post-mortem starts from guesswork.
What they should have had: Uptime and response-time history on the Convex health endpoint. Incident timelines become a chart instead of a debate.
Why Monitor Convex?
Convex runs your backend logic and data together, and keeps clients in sync in real time. When a deployment has a problem, every query, mutation and live update in your app is affected at once. HTTP actions give you a simple way to watch it from outside: a small health endpoint on your deployment's convex.site domain that an uptime monitor can check on a schedule.
What to Monitor
your-deployment.convex.site/healthA small HTTP action you add that returns 200 (and optionally runs a quick query) to confirm your deployment answersyour-app.comThe frontend your users open, which can fail independently of Convexyour-deployment.convex.site/your-webhook-routeAny HTTP action that third parties call, such as payment or auth webhooksWhat You Should Actually Do
- 1Add a small HTTP action at /health that returns 200, optionally after a quick read query, and monitor its convex.site URL
- 2Monitor every HTTP action that third parties call, like payment or auth webhooks; Convex doesn't automatically retry HTTP actions that fail
- 3Monitor your frontend separately, so a hosting problem and a backend problem look different
- 4Watch response times on the health action; a slow query or heavy function shows up as rising latency before it fails
- 5Check your monitors right after every deploy; a function that throws fails for every user the moment it ships
- 6Check status.convex.dev during incidents, but remember it covers the platform, not your functions or deploys
Convex's Official Status Page
Convex publishes real-time status at status.convex.dev. Monitoristic doesn't replace this — it complements it. The official page tells you when Convex reports an issue. Your own monitor tells you when your connection is affected, often before the status page updates. You also get push alerts instead of checking a webpage manually.
The Takeaway
Convex keeps your app reactive by tying the frontend tightly to the backend, which also means backend problems show up everywhere at once, often as quiet spinners rather than loud errors. A monitored health action and your webhook routes give you a clear signal the moment something breaks.