Vercel monitoring
The deploy succeeded. Did the site survive it?
Sitewatch runs a full check the moment a Vercel deploy lands and alerts you if a page stopped working — a bundle the page can no longer find, a stale cached route, a function returning an error inside a perfectly normal response.
- A deploy hook fires the check the instant your build ships
- Verifies what visitors receive, not what the build log said
- Checks from EU and US to catch region-specific edge failures
Deploy hook received
Vercel → Sitewatch
12 pages checked
142 files verified
App bundle
_next/static/chunks/main-a3f2c1.js → 404
Slack alert sent
#deploys
01What can go wrong
A green deploy is not a working site.
Vercel makes shipping fast, which also makes breaking things fast. The build passed. The deploy is live. Nothing has actually checked the result.
- 01A build ships and the dashboard turns green.
- 02The page still answers, so your uptime check stays green too.
- 03But the page is asking for a bundle that no longer exists, so nothing interactive works.
- 04Everything looks deployed, and the app is a static shell for every visitor.
- Nobody finds out until someone tries to use it.
02Why traditional monitoring misses this
"Deployed successfully" and "works" are different claims.
A build log describes the build. An uptime check asks whether the server answered. We don't just check that your site is online — we check that people can actually use it.
Build log + uptime check
Neither of them ever opened the page.
Sitewatch
Only "healthy" once the deployed page holds together.
03How Sitewatch catches it
One question, after every deploy.
Not "did the build pass?" — but the one your users answer for you otherwise: can someone actually use this page right now?
- ✓Every page still resolves
- ✓App bundles load
- ✓Styling loads
- ✓Images load
- ✓Content is not stale
- ✓Redirects resolve
- ✓No preview URLs in production
- ✓Certificate is valid
04Typical failures we catch
The breakage a green deploy hides.
The page asks for a bundle that is gone
A build changes the file hash and the served page still points at the old one.
→The app never becomes interactive for anyone
A cached route stopped updating
Background regeneration fails quietly and visitors keep getting the old page.
→Stale prices, stale stock, stale content — indefinitely
A function returns an error inside a normal response
The code catches its own failure and answers with an error message in the body.
→Users read "something went wrong" while monitoring reads "fine"
The edge is serving the wrong build
After a rollback, cached files and served pages disagree about which build is live.
→A slice of your traffic gets a half-reverted site
A preview URL leaked into production
A hardcoded link or redirect sends real traffic at an unstable preview build.
→Customers land on unreleased work
A cold start answered too early
A function responds before everything it needs is ready.
→The page renders with missing data
05Two-minute setup
Set up Vercel monitoring
- 01
Add your production URL
Sitewatch finds the pages and everything they load. No code changes, no build plugin.
- 02
Connect the deploy hook
Copy the Sitewatch webhook URL into your Vercel project settings so every deploy triggers a check.
- 03
Ship and find out
Push your next deploy. The check runs within minutes and alerts you in Slack if anything the page needs is missing.
06Inside a deploy check
What runs the moment your build lands.
The check your pipeline is missing
Vercel tells you the build succeeded. The deploy hook tells Sitewatch to go and find out whether that is the same thing as working. It opens each page you care about and fetches everything those pages ask for — the same requests a real browser would make.
08Different questions
Vercel Analytics vs Sitewatch
| Scenario | Vercel Analytics | Sitewatch |
|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | How fast is the page? | Does the page still work? |
| Missing bundle after a build | Not detected | Detected, with the file named |
| Stale cached route | Not detected | Content compared against its baseline |
| Checks after a deploy | No | Automatic, via the deploy hook |
| Alerts outside the dashboard | No | Slack, email, webhook and more |
The question it answers
- Vercel Analytics:
- How fast is the page?
- Sitewatch:
- Does the page still work?
Missing bundle after a build
- Vercel Analytics:
- Not detected
- Sitewatch:
- Detected, with the file named
Stale cached route
- Vercel Analytics:
- Not detected
- Sitewatch:
- Content compared against its baseline
Checks after a deploy
- Vercel Analytics:
- No
- Sitewatch:
- Automatic, via the deploy hook
Alerts outside the dashboard
- Vercel Analytics:
- No
- Sitewatch:
- Slack, email, webhook and more
2
Check regions on Pro (EU + US)
5 min
Fastest check interval
Free
For your first site
Deploy with confidence on Vercel
Connect a deploy hook and verify your next ship in under two minutes. Free plan, no credit card.
09Questions
Vercel monitoring questions, answered
Yes. Sitewatch checks the output — the page and the files your visitors receive. Whether that page came from a static build, a serverless function or an edge function makes no difference to the check.
Yes. Sitewatch fingerprints each page's content and compares it against the baseline, so when background regeneration fails and visitors keep receiving the old version, the drift is flagged rather than silently accepted.
A webhook is enough. Add the Sitewatch deploy hook URL to your Vercel project and every deploy triggers a full check within minutes.
Often, yes. When a function catches its own failure and answers with an error page, the response looks healthy to an uptime check — but the content has changed, and files the real page would have loaded are missing. Both of those are things Sitewatch compares on every run.
Yes. If your monorepo deploys several sites — marketing, docs, app — add each domain as its own monitored site with its own deploy hook and alert routing.
The failures overlap, but the argument does not. This page is about verifying the output of a deploy — build hashes, cached routes, edge behaviour. The Netlify page is about why a green build and a passing preview still do not tell you the live site works. If you ship on both, read both.
10Related pages