# How to Monitor PlanetScale Uptime

> PlanetScale is a serverless MySQL-compatible database platform built on Vitess, used by teams that need scalable, branchable databases without managing infrastructure.

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

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## Why Monitor PlanetScale?

Your database is the floor everything else stands on. If your app can't reach PlanetScale, every page that touches data fails — logins, dashboards, checkouts. You can't ping PlanetScale's internal servers, but you can monitor the app endpoints that depend on the database, so you find out the moment queries start failing instead of when users do.

## What to Monitor

- `your-app.com/api/health` — A health endpoint that runs a real database query
- `your-app.com/login` — A user-facing path that requires a database read
- `status.planetscale.com` — PlanetScale's platform status for service-level incidents

## What You Should Actually Do

1. Monitor an app health endpoint that runs a real database query — not just a static route, so you actually exercise the PlanetScale connection
2. Monitor a user-facing path that reads from the database — so you catch failures the way users experience them
3. Set a slow-response threshold — database degradation often shows as creeping latency before a full failure
4. Keep alerts on a channel independent of your app — so an outage doesn't suppress the notification
5. Bookmark PlanetScale's status page for platform-wide incidents, but rely on your own monitors for connection and query issues

## PlanetScale's Official Status Page

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

## Takeaway

You can't monitor PlanetScale's servers, but you can monitor the thing that matters: whether your app can actually run queries. The most dangerous database failures are partial — static pages load while every data operation quietly fails — making the site look up when it's broken for real users. A health endpoint that runs a real query, watched continuously, closes the gap between 'queries are failing' and 'you know queries are failing.'

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Can I monitor my PlanetScale database directly?

Not the servers themselves — PlanetScale is fully managed. Instead, monitor an app health endpoint that runs a real query against the database. If that endpoint fails while static pages stay up, you know the data layer is the problem.

### How do I tell a PlanetScale issue from an app bug?

Monitor both a static route and a database-dependent route. If the static route is up but the query-backed route fails, the problem is in the data path — either your connection config or a PlanetScale incident. Cross-check with their status page.

### What check interval should I use for a database-backed endpoint?

For production apps, 1–2 minute checks catch connection failures fast. Add a slow-response threshold so you're warned about creeping query latency before it becomes a full outage. Monitoristic offers 5 min (Lite), 2 min (Pro), and 1 min (Business).

### How is this different from PlanetScale's status page?

PlanetScale's status page reports platform-wide incidents. It won't tell you that your specific connection pool is exhausted, your credentials expired, or your app can't reach the database. Only monitoring your own query-backed endpoint catches those app-specific failures.