How to monitor your service

In MHCLG, we follow the Service Manual guidance on how to monitor the status of services and set performance metrics.

We recommend using a 3rd party service to monitor your service’s availability from outside our network. To further make sure your service is working, you should:

run regular smoke tests using a browser automation app such as Selenium
implement a tool to ensure user journeys are working as you expect
monitor applications for errors using an error tracking app such as Sentry
implement configuration management to set up repeatable monitoring

Using metrics-based monitoring

Collecting metrics on the performance of your service is useful for capacity planning and autoscaling. You should apply metrics-based monitoring to measure aggregated numerical data about your service and create dashboards to view metrics from your datasource, for example related to your infrastructure or application.

For services hosted in AWS we recommend using CloudWatch Metrics unless you have more specific needs.

This page was last reviewed on 28 July 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 28 October 2025 by the page owner #mhclg-way .