How to Monitor SaaS Performance and Usage

What to Monitor

Usage Metrics

Track how customers use your product so you can make data-driven decisions about what to build next:

• Active users: How many unique accounts used your product today, this week, and this month? Rising active users means growth. Declining means you have a retention problem.
• Feature usage: Which features are used most and least? Heavily used features deserve investment. Unused features might need better discoverability or should be removed.
• API call volume: How many API calls are being made per hour and per day? Sudden spikes might indicate abuse. Gradual increases confirm growth.

Performance Metrics

Track how fast your application responds so you can catch performance problems early:

• Response time: How long do API calls take? Watch for endpoints that are slower than 500ms, as these affect user experience.
• Error rates: What percentage of requests return errors? A sudden increase in errors usually means a bug in a recent change.
• Background job success rates: Are scheduled tasks completing successfully? Failed jobs can silently break customer workflows.

Built-in Monitoring on the Platform

The platform's appReports system logs usage data automatically. You can query this data to build reports and dashboards. The billing system also tracks usage per account, which doubles as a usage monitoring tool since credit consumption directly reflects product usage.

For custom monitoring, your app code can write log entries to the appReports table during any operation. Store timestamps, account IDs, operation types, and relevant metrics. Then build admin pages that query and display this data as reports.

Customer Health Monitoring

Beyond technical metrics, monitor customer engagement to identify accounts that may churn:

• Accounts with declining usage over the past 30 days
• Accounts that have not logged in within the past 14 days
• Accounts that created an account but never completed onboarding

Use re-engagement campaigns to reach out to at-risk accounts automatically.