Your SaaS Will Break — Here’s How to See It Coming
What many founders realize only after their first outage.
You know that peaceful moment when you’ve just deployed your SaaS MVP?
No users yet. No traffic. Everything looks fine.
It’s the most deceptive calm in tech.
Because here’s what happens next:
Someone signs up. A few cron jobs kick in. A background task fails silently.
And you have no clue why.
Not because you’re a bad engineer.
But because you never gave yourself eyes.
I’ve been there — staring at a blank terminal, trying to reproduce a bug I can’t see, because I didn’t bother adding even basic observability before launch.
That’s when you realize: you don’t need users to create chaos. You just need time.
Your SaaS will break.
Something small. Something silly. Something preventable.
And when it does, you want breadcrumbs.
You don’t need Grafana dashboards or Prometheus metrics yet.
You just need awareness. A few tiny habits that make you less blind:
Log errors to stdout. Your logs are your first debugger.
Add Sentry for unhandled exceptions — because one will always sneak through.
Expose a /healthz endpoint. It’s the easiest way to check if your app is even alive.
Capture latency in middleware. You don’t need histograms; just print request times.
That’s enough.
You’re not setting up a monitoring stack. You’re giving your future self context.
You’re leaving breadcrumbs for when things go sideways.
Because when that first user says,
“Hey, your site’s kinda slow today,”
you’ll know where to look — not just what broke.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been grateful for a random log line I wrote months ago.
Future-me has sent past-me several thank-you notes.
So, before you chase new features or users…
Add observability.
Give yourself eyes. 👀
It’s the calmest insurance policy you’ll ever set up.