Uptime.com Blog

Why Developer Work-Life Balance Depends on Quality Website Monitoring

Work-life balance is so important to us that 72% of U.S. employees consider it a high priority when choosing a job. It lets you spend time with your family and friends and gives you a much-needed break from work. For those of us in the website monitoring world, it can be hard to find that balance.

Bad website monitoring only worsens the issue, leading to more stressed-out, overworked developers who ultimately burn out and even quit.

That is why choosing the right quality website monitoring tool is essential in keeping your work-life balance. Here are the details of why bad website monitoring can be detrimental and what you can do to prevent it from taking over your personal life.

The Problem: Bad Website Monitoring

Site reliability monitoring tracks the health of your website, application, or service for any possible issues that could cause downtime or latency that will affect customers. This is to save your business from losing customer trust if your website is having problems.

This monitoring can be configured to alert you when something is wrong. At its best, it will point you to site outages and help you fix issues, but at its worse, it could constantly contact you about issues that don’t need to be fixed.

This constant, unnecessary alerting can lead to the following pains:

Constant Stress

Having too many alerts can cause anxiety and stress because developers can no longer trust the alerts. You won’t know when the alerts are going to come. Therefore your mind will stay locked on alert status — especially if those alerts are telling you it is a high priority and needs to be addressed right away, only to find out it was not an issue at all or the issue fixed itself. A constantly alert mind will drain much-needed energy from you.

Mental Fatigue

It is important to take mental breaks from work for better creativity and productivity. Without them, you can find yourself stuck in “work mode,” which never gives you true time to unplug and rejuvenate yourself. And without this rest comes the inevitable burnout.

Also, alerts coming in the deepest hours of the night can disrupt your sleep, which can lead to “brain fog,” ultimately lowering your productivity and problem-solving abilities as well.

Loss of Personal Time

Unmanaged alerting can directly inject itself into your personal life. They can ping you during your child’s birthday party or friend’s event, demanding you check on an error that ends up not being an error at all. This can harm your relationships and keep you from living your life fully in the present moment with your loved ones.

The Solution: Quality Website Monitoring

To protect your work-life balance, you’ll want to make sure to choose a site reliability monitoring solution that offers many ways to reduce unnecessary alerts. Some examples of these offerings can include the following:

Accommodating Sensitivity

Sensitivity advanced checks keep alerting to a minimum by giving you the ability to set thresholds of when an alert should be sent. For some monitoring systems like Uptime.com, you can choose the number of locations that need to be down before a check triggers an alert. Having something like this in place can significantly reduce the number of alerts coming through to developers.

Flexible Retries

Retry options rerun health check attempts a certain number of times before sending a notification. This allows time for temporary issues to solve themselves before alerting developers. Having a feature like this helps website monitoring tools reduce false positive alerts.

Manually Adjustable Check States

The more customizable checks a monitoring solution gives, the better it can adjust to your needs. For example, does the monitoring tool allow you to update, delete, or pause checks for maintenance times? Does it allow you to adjust the interval at which checks are made? These features will be important in making sure your monitoring is of quality standards.

Work-Life Balance Is Key

It is extremely important for your mental health and personal life to maintain a work-life balance that will ultimately make you more productive, happy, and sharp. A quality website monitoring tool by your side will help maintain that pivotal balance.

Uptime.com provides a monitoring service that can give you the features you need to reduce the number of false positives and unnecessary alerts.

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