Posted by: Luke Munday
01 September 2025
A product team pinged us at 06:12. Overnight conversions had dipped but nothing was “down”. We checked monitoring and saw error rates creeping up after an API change. A quick rollback restored normal service before the first coffee. No tweetstorm, no lost campaign. That is the value of proactive monitoring. It gives you early warning and enough time to act.
Business value takeaway: early signals prevent public incidents and protect revenue windows.
Definition + pain points
Definition: Proactive monitoring is continuous observation of your Umbraco stack across availability, performance, errors and dependencies. You collect metrics, logs and traces, then alert on meaningful thresholds so engineers can act before customers notice. Azure Monitor and Application Insights provide availability tests, failure analysis and performance views in one place, which makes this practical for .NET and Umbraco teams (Azure Monitor; Application Insights overview).
At a glance – questions leaders ask
- How do we cut mean time to recovery without adding headcount
- Which signals predict incidents on a busy Umbraco site
- Will monitoring help Core Web Vitals and search visibility
- What should we alert on to avoid noise and sleepless nights
- How do we evidence good practice to auditors and the board
Business value takeaway: define the signals and thresholds, then measure recovery speed, not just uptime.
How proactive monitoring works on Umbraco
Layers that work together
- Uptime and reachability: synthetic checks confirm your key pages respond from multiple regions (Application Insights availability tests).
- Performance and capacity: CPU, RAM, response time and queue depth show whether infrastructure is scaling under load (Azure Monitor data reference).
- Application errors: traces and exceptions reveal failing APIs, caching gaps and template issues (Application Insights overview).
- User experience: Core Web Vitals track loading, interactivity and visual stability with field data, so content and code changes are measured for real users (Core Web Vitals).
- Policy and governance: good logging and monitoring are expected controls in recognised frameworks, so you can show continuous awareness and faster response (NCSC logging & monitoring; NIST SP 800-137).
Alerting that people can live with
Tie alerts to service level objectives so on-call noise is low and action is clear. Google’s SRE workbook describes turning SLOs into actionable alerts focused on user impact, not every spike (SRE workbook – alerting on SLOs).
Business value takeaway: pair synthetic checks with app telemetry and SLO-based alerts to spot trouble early without alert fatigue.
Comparison table
| Capability | Reactive only (tickets) | Proactive monitoring | Proactive + SLOs (best) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Detection | Users report issues | Synthetic and telemetry spot issues | SLO-based alerts trigger on user impact |
| Time to detect (TTD) | Hours | Minutes | Minutes with clear runbooks |
| Mean time to recovery (MTTR) | Unpredictable | Faster via root-cause signals | Fastest with automated runbooks |
| SEO impact | Risk of outages and slow pages | Better stability | Core Web Vitals tracked and protected (Core Web Vitals) |
| Evidence for audits | Ad-hoc | Dashboards and alerts | Tests, evidence packs and SLO reports |
Business value takeaway: moving from tickets to telemetry reduces detection time and keeps MTTR trending down.
Outcomes by role (with metrics)
- CEO: fewer public incidents and more stable campaigns.
- CFO: less wasted spend on peak firefighting. Use avoided downtime × value per hour to quantify payback.
- CTO: lower MTTR and cleaner change windows through observability and clear SLOs (SRE workbook – implementing SLOs).
- CMO: more consistent UX and visibility. Core Web Vitals are tracked metrics for loading, interactivity and stability that support search performance (Core Web Vitals).
- COO: operational predictability. Logs and monitoring are recognised controls in UK guidance and NIST frameworks (NCSC logging & monitoring; NIST SP 800-137A).
Business value takeaway: monitoring turns reliability into numbers the whole exec team can understand.
Proof points & validation
- Vendor: Application Insights runs global availability tests and surfaces failures and performance bottlenecks in one place (Availability tests; App Insights overview).
- Standard/regulator: UK NCSC and NIST both emphasise logging and continuous monitoring for faster detection and response (NCSC logging & monitoring; NIST SP 800-137).
- Analyst: Forrester highlights shared responsibility models for observability so teams can turn telemetry into action, not just dashboards (Forrester observability reference architecture).
Quantified client example (Growcreate): On a multi-brand Umbraco estate, adding synthetic checks, dependency tracking and SLO-based alerts cut TTD from ~18 minutes to ~4 minutes and MTTR by 36% over 90 days. Core Web Vitals improved, with Largest Contentful Paint down 18% on key templates. Campaign windows ran without change freezes.
Business value takeaway: platform features plus disciplined alerting deliver measurable reductions in TTD and MTTR.
How Growcreate delivers monitoring for Umbraco
- Azure-native stack: Application Insights for traces, failures and performance; Azure Monitor for metrics, dashboards and alerts (Azure Monitor).
- Availability tests: synthetic checks from multiple regions against critical pages and APIs (Availability tests).
- SLO-driven alerting: error rate and latency budgets mapped to your SLAs, so alerts match user impact (SRE – alerting on SLOs).
- 24/7 response: alerts route straight to our support desk for triage and fix.
- Monthly performance reviews: we surface recurring slow queries, rising resource use and regression risks, then agree changes that keep growth on track.
Business value takeaway: you get continuous visibility, faster fixes and a steady pipeline of improvements.
See problems before your users do
We’ll wire up availability tests, app telemetry and SLO-based alerts, then tune thresholds until the noise drops and the signal sings.
Book a 60-minute monitoring review – get your first dashboard, alert set and three improvements.
FAQs
Continuous checks across uptime, performance, errors and dependencies so issues are found and fixed before users feel them. Application Insights and Azure Monitor provide the building blocks for .NET platforms (Azure Monitor; Application Insights overview).
Availability, response time, error rate, CPU/RAM, queue length and database health. Track Core Web Vitals to protect user experience and search performance (Core Web Vitals).
Reactive support waits for tickets. Proactive monitoring uses synthetic tests and telemetry to detect issues early and route them to on-call. This reduces detection time and improves MTTR.
Yes. Stability prevents crawl errors and fast pages support visibility because Core Web Vitals measure loading, interactivity and stability with real-world data (Core Web Vitals). For planned downtime, serve the right status codes to avoid search impact (Google guidance on downtime).
Tie alerts to SLOs for success rate and latency so only user-impacting events page the on-call team (SRE – alerting on SLOs).
Good logging and monitoring are expected controls in UK and US frameworks and support faster detection and response (NCSC logging & monitoring; NIST SP 800-137A).