The 3am Mystery

Narrated

It’s a Tuesday morning. You wake up, check your phone, and see seventeen messages from users. “App is broken.” “Can’t load my trips.” “Getting a weird error.” “Is this down?”

You open your laptop. You go to the app. It loads fine. Everything looks normal. You click around. Trips load. Photos show up. Payments work. What are they talking about?

You scroll through the messages. The first one came in at 2:47am. The last one at 4:30am. Then… nothing. Whatever broke, it fixed itself. Or maybe your hosting provider restarted something. Or maybe the database ran out of connections and recovered.

You will never know what happened.

This is the most frustrating experience in software. Something breaks. It affects real users. And by the time you look, the evidence is gone. It’s like trying to investigate a crime scene that’s been cleaned up. No logs. No alerts. No data. Just angry users and a shrug.

This happens to every application that doesn’t have monitoring. And if you think about it, that’s most of the apps built by solo developers. The app works when they’re watching. It breaks when they’re not. And they find out from their users instead of from their tools.

Professional teams solved this a long time ago. They use monitoring tools that watch the app 24/7, catch errors the moment they happen, and send alerts to your phone when something goes wrong. The app doesn’t need you to be awake. The tools are always awake.

After this lesson, you’ll know about problems before your users do. That’s the goal. Let’s set it up.