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Store Monitoring

Choosing a monitoring tool when you also run the store.

Store monitoring tools fall into three groups that look similar in a listing and behave nothing alike: uptime monitors that ping a URL, audit tools that grade a site once, and store-aware monitors that read your catalog and order data. Buying the wrong group is the usual reason monitoring gets set up, ignored, and cancelled. Here is how to tell them apart and what to weigh if you are a small team with no time to babysit a dashboard.

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Free plan, no credit cardRead-only connectionAlerts to email, Telegram, Slack or Discord

The three groups

Work out which group you need before comparing products inside one. Most small stores end up wanting the third, discover the first is cheaper, and are then surprised that a green dashboard did not prevent a bad week.

GroupWhat it watchesWhat it cannot seeTypical entry price
Uptime monitorsWhether a URL responds, from several regionsOrders, prices, stock, catalog, checkout successFree to about $10/month
Audit and SEO toolsA crawl graded against best practice, on demandAnything happening right now; nothing is continuous$50–$200/month
Store-aware monitorsOrders, prices, stock and availability via the platform APINothing outside the store’s own data and pagesFree to about $130/month

The seven questions worth asking

In rough order of how much they matter for a store that sells rather than a site that publishes.

  1. Does it know your store, or only your URL? A monitor that cannot read order volume cannot tell you the checkout broke, because a broken checkout returns 200 OK.
  2. How long until it tells you? Compare check intervals honestly, and ask what the interval is on the plan you would actually buy rather than the top one.
  3. Does it confirm before it alerts? A tool that pages you on a single failed request will be muted within a fortnight, which is the same as not having it.
  4. Where does the alert land? Email is the floor. If a critical alert cannot reach a phone through a channel you already watch, the tool is a dashboard rather than a monitor.
  5. Can you set different thresholds per channel? Without that, you either get woken for informational findings or you miss the ones that matter.
  6. What access does it need? Read-only should be enough for monitoring. A tool asking for write access to your catalog is asking for a bigger blast radius than the job requires.
  7. What does it cost when your store grows? Per-monitor and per-page pricing scales in ways that are not obvious at signup.

When a simple uptime monitor is genuinely the right answer

If what you need is “tell me if the site is down” and nothing more, a dedicated uptime monitor does that well and costs very little. Several are free at useful intervals, offer more check regions than Cassian™ does, and include status pages. There is no sense paying for store monitoring you will not use.

The moment that stops being enough is the first incident where the store was up and not selling. That failure mode is invisible to an HTTP check by definition, and it is the most common serious incident a store has.

What Cassian™ is, plainly

Cassian™ is the third group. It connects to your store with read-only access, watches order flow, prices, stock, availability, links, speed and SEO signals, and sends alerts to email, Telegram, Slack or Discord. The Cassian Score™ summarises overall health, but the alerts are the product — “what is wrong right now” always outranks “how healthy overall”.

It is not the cheapest way to check whether a URL responds, and it is not a rank tracker or a keyword tool. If those are what you need, buy those.

What Cassian™ actually does

Specific checks, with the plan they run on.

Cassian™ reads order counts, catalog prices and stock levels through your platform’s official admin API with read-only access — no theme edits and no code changes.

Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Wix. Stock tracking on WooCommerce and BigCommerce only.

The free Inspector plan includes zero-order critical alerts, daily page speed scores, weekly scans and link checks. No card required.

Inspector, free.

Alerts go to email on every plan, and to Telegram, Slack or Discord on Protector and above — each channel with its own minimum severity.

Email on every plan. Other channels on Protector and above.

Uptime checks run every 5 minutes on Protector and Guardian and every minute on Prime and Enterprise, from a single region today.

Protector and above. Single check region — dedicated uptime monitors offer more.

Every scan runs 33 deterministic checks per page, and page limits scale from 10 pages on the free plan to 5,000 on Guardian.

Every plan.

FAQ

Common questions

What are the best tools for Shopify monitoring?
It depends which of three jobs you are hiring for. For pure availability, a dedicated uptime monitor such as UptimeRobot, Better Stack or Pingdom checks whether a URL responds, from multiple regions, cheaply. For a one-off technical audit, a crawler-based SEO tool grades your site against best practice. For continuous store monitoring — orders stopping, prices breaking, stock running out, alongside availability — you need something connected to your store’s own data, which is the category Cassian™ is in. Many stores run an uptime monitor and a store monitor together; the two answer different questions.
What should a small store look for in a monitoring tool?
Four things, in order. Whether it can see the failure that actually costs you money — a broken checkout returns a perfectly healthy 200 OK, so a URL check will never catch it. How long it takes to tell you. Whether the alert reaches a phone rather than a dashboard. And whether it confirms a failure before alerting, because a tool that cries wolf gets muted and then cancelled. Price matters, but a cheap tool that watches the wrong thing is not a saving.
Do I need both an uptime monitor and a store monitor?
Many stores run both, and it is a reasonable setup. A dedicated uptime monitor gives you more check regions and a public status page. A store monitor gives you the checks that need to see inside the store. Cassian™ covers availability too, at 5-minute checks from Protector, so for most single-store owners it is enough on its own — but if multi-region checking matters to you, keep the specialist.
How much should store monitoring cost?
Anchor it against an hour of your revenue rather than against other tools. If an hour offline costs $300, a $129/month plan pays for itself the first time it saves half an incident. If an hour costs $20, start on a free plan and add paid monitoring when the store grows into it. Cassian™ is free at Inspector, $49 at Analyst, and $129 at Protector where uptime and phone-reachable alert channels begin.

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