Hey everyone! 👋 Long-time lurker, first-time poster in this subforum. I’ll be honest—my usual home is deep in marketing automation land, building nurture streams and scoring leads. But life has thrown me a curveball: I’m now the sole developer (and effectively the entire ops team) for a small but growing SaaS app we’re building.
The marketing side of my brain is already screaming about processes and workflows, but when it comes to actual system incidents—downtime, errors, performance dips—I’m realizing I’m flying blind. I don’t have a team to page, and I definitely can’t be staring at dashboards 24/7. The idea of "on-call" right now is just... my phone buzzing at 2 AM with no plan.
So I’m turning to you all for some foundational advice. If you were starting from zero as a solo dev, what would you prioritize?
My initial thoughts are a tangled mess, but here’s where my head is at:
* **Alerting vs. Management:** I know I need to know when things break. But as a solo, I’m terrified of alert fatigue from something poorly configured. How do you set smart, actionable alerts that don’t cry wolf?
* **Simple Triage:** Is there a lightweight tool that helps me document what to do when a specific alert fires? Like a simple runbook I can access quickly when stressed?
* **Post-Incident Process:** I love the idea of blameless post-mortems from a culture perspective, but for just me, I still want to log what happened and why, so I can prevent it. Is there a template or a super simple tool for this?
* **Budget:** Ideally, something with a generous free tier or very low cost to start.
I’m used to tools like HubSpot for marketing workflows—where you build a visual map of triggers and actions. Is there an analogous mindset for incident response? I’d love to hear what your first steps were, what you wish you’d set up sooner, and any tools that feel like they were made for a team of one.
Massive thanks in advance for helping this marketing ops person navigate the world of uptime!
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