Question 1

What is moniduck?

Accepted Answer

moniduck is a monitoring and reliability cockpit for the SaaS applications a company depends on. It checks each vendor's real API endpoint every minute with an API key you provide, decides whether a failure is confirmed before telling anyone, posts confirmed incidents to Slack with their measured duration, and drafts SLA credit claims when a vendor misses its contractual uptime target. It runs entirely in the cloud: there is nothing to install.

Question 2

How is moniduck different from reading a vendor status page?

Accepted Answer

moniduck never reads vendor status pages. Those are updated by hand, often late, and a vendor has no incentive to publish minutes it would have to credit back. moniduck calls the vendor's real API with your key, on the same path your users take, and its own measurements are the single source of truth. A green status page does not override a failed check.

Question 3

How does moniduck avoid false alerts?

Accepted Answer

Through a state machine evaluated atomically in Postgres on every check result. A first failure moves the check to suspect and sends nothing. An incident is created only on the transition to down, once the failure is confirmed. Latency over your threshold reports as degraded without paging. Each check also has a minimum duration threshold, so an outage shorter than that is never announced, and never announced retroactively after it has already recovered.

Question 4

What happens if one of my API keys expires?

Accepted Answer

A 401 or 403 puts the check in a broken_credential state. That is a configuration problem, not a vendor outage: no incident is opened, nobody is paged, and the period is excluded from uptime arithmetic so it cannot inflate an SLA credit claim. Recovery is silent once a valid key answers again.

Question 5

Which applications can moniduck monitor?

Accepted Answer

Anything reachable over HTTP, with or without an API key: Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Zendesk, Figma, GitHub, Stripe, Google Workspace, your ERP, an internal service. A reference catalog pre-fills the endpoint, the expected status code and where the vendor wants the key for common vendors, but it is reference data rather than an integration, so an unlisted vendor works exactly the same and needs no waiting.

Question 6

How does moniduck recover SLA credits?

Accepted Answer

You upload the contract as a PDF. moniduck extracts the uptime target, the credit tiers, the claim window and the claim channel, and every field is presented for human validation before it is stored. When an incident closes, monthly uptime is recomputed from your own incident history and matched against the target. If the target is missed, a quantified claim email draft is generated for you to review, adjust and send. Nothing is ever sent automatically.

Question 7

Where are my API keys stored?

Accepted Answer

In a secrets vault, written through a server-side function. The row describing a check stores only a uuid reference, never the secret: it is not in the business tables, not in the logs, and not readable from the browser once saved. Read-only keys with the narrowest scope the vendor offers are recommended, since a check only needs a response code.

Question 8

Do I need to install an agent or grant a Google Workspace OAuth scope?

Accepted Answer

No. moniduck is entirely cloud-hosted: there is no collector on your machines, no on-premise hardware, and no directory-wide OAuth consent to obtain. You add each application yourself in a wizard, with one scoped API key per application, and you test the check for real before saving it.

Question 9

What is TV mode?

Accepted Answer

A read-only dashboard served on a non-guessable token at /tv/{token}, meant for a screen in the office: stack status, active incidents and their duration, legible across the room with no login. It is served by an edge function rather than by an anonymous database policy, and revoking the token turns the screen off.

Question 10

Who is moniduck for?

Accepted Answer

An IT lead or a small IT team running a SaaS-first environment with no dedicated SRE team: the person who is the whole escalation path when a colleague says an application is slow. moniduck answers what broke, since when, and whether a vendor owes money for it.