The Hidden Dependency Problem

Most engineering teams know their primary cloud provider. But ask them to list every third-party service their application depends on, and you'll get an incomplete answer.

The average modern application depends on 15-30 external services. Email delivery through SendGrid, authentication via Auth0, payments through Stripe, monitoring via Datadog, CDN through Cloudflare — each one is a potential point of failure.

Why Single-Provider Monitoring Falls Short

If you're only monitoring AWS (or Azure, or GCP), you're missing the bigger picture:

The Cascade Effect

When Cloudflare had a major outage in 2024, it wasn't just websites that went down. Services that depended on Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, or DDoS protection all went dark — including services that didn't even advertise Cloudflare as a dependency.

Hidden Dependencies

Your application might not directly use Fastly, but your payment provider might. Your CI/CD pipeline might depend on GitHub, which depends on Azure. These transitive dependencies are invisible until they break.

The SaaS Sprawl Reality

A typical company's dependency list includes:

  • Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP, Cloudflare, Fastly
  • Dev tools: GitHub, GitLab, Docker Hub, npm
  • Communication: Slack, Teams, Zoom, Twilio
  • Business: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk
  • Payments: Stripe, PayPal, Braintree
  • Auth: Okta, Auth0, Clerk
  • Analytics: Datadog, New Relic, Amplitude
  • Email: SendGrid, Mailchimp, Postmark

Building a Monitoring Strategy

Step 1: Map Your Dependencies

Create a complete inventory of every external service your application uses:

  • Audit your codebase for API calls to external services
  • Review your DNS records for third-party CNAME entries
  • Check your package managers for hosted registry dependencies
  • Survey your team — individual developers often know about dependencies that aren't documented

    • Step 2: Classify by Criticality

    Not all dependencies are equal. Classify each one:

    • Critical: Application can't function without it (e.g., primary database, auth provider)
    • Important: Degraded experience without it (e.g., email delivery, analytics)
    • Nice-to-have: Minor feature loss (e.g., social login, recommendation engine)

    Step 3: Set Up Centralized Monitoring

    Use ServiceAlert.ai to monitor all your dependencies from a single dashboard. We track 600+ services and alert you via:

    • Email notifications
    • Slack messages
    • Microsoft Teams alerts
    • Discord webhooks
    • Google Chat notifications

    Step 4: Configure Alert Routing

    Not every alert needs to wake someone up at 3 AM:

    • Critical services: Immediate alerts to on-call engineer + engineering channel
    • Important services: Alert to engineering channel during business hours
    • Nice-to-have: Daily digest or dashboard-only monitoring

    Step 5: Plan for Each Failure Mode

    For each critical and important dependency, document:

    • What breaks when this service is down?
    • Who needs to be notified?
    • Is there a fallback or workaround?
    • What's the expected recovery time?

    The Cost of Not Monitoring

    The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute for mid-size companies. But the real cost isn't just direct revenue loss — it's:

    • Customer trust: Users who experience outages are more likely to churn
    • Engineering time: Unmonitored outages take longer to diagnose because you're debugging your own code when the issue is upstream
    • Reputation: Your users don't care that it was your vendor's fault — they blame you

    Getting Started

    The good news is that setting up comprehensive dependency monitoring is straightforward:

  • Browse our service catalog to find your dependencies
  • Create a free account and select the services you use
  • Configure your preferred alert channels
  • You'll be notified within minutes of any status change

    • Stop being the last to know when your dependencies go down.

    View all 600+ monitored services | Set up monitoring