Fider Monitoring with Vigilmon: Uptime, Health Checks & Email Service Alerts for Customer Feedback

Your product team just announced a new feature and asked customers to vote on it in Fider. Fifty people click the link. Half of them get a 502. The other half submit feedback that never triggers email notifications because the SMTP connection failed silently three days ago. Your feedback board is supposed to be open — it's just invisible.

Fider is an open-source customer feedback and feature voting platform that teams self-host to collect, organize, and prioritize user ideas. When Fider goes down or email notifications stop working, you don't just lose uptime — you lose the customer signal your roadmap depends on.

Vigilmon gives you external monitoring for Fider's health endpoint, web UI, and email notification pipeline so customer feedback always gets through.

What You'll Build

• A Vigilmon HTTP monitor on Fider's health endpoint
• A web UI availability monitor for the public feedback board
• An email notification service check
• SSL certificate expiry alerts
• Alert channels for your product and engineering team

Prerequisites

• A running Fider instance (v0.21+ recommended)
• A free account at vigilmon.online

Step 1: Monitor Fider's Health Endpoint

Fider exposes a health endpoint at /health that returns the server's operational status without requiring authentication.

Test it:

curl https://feedback.example.com/health

Expected response:

healthy

Or in some versions:

{"status": "healthy"}

A 200 response confirms the Fider Go server is running and the database is reachable. If PostgreSQL becomes unavailable or the process crashes, the health endpoint returns a non-200 status or fails to respond.

Set up the Vigilmon monitor:

1. Log in to Vigilmon and click New Monitor → HTTP.
2. Set URL to https://feedback.example.com/health.
3. Set Check interval to 60 seconds.
4. Set Expected status code to 200.
5. Under Advanced → Keyword check:
   • Keyword present: healthy
6. Save the monitor.

Vigilmon now polls your Fider health endpoint every minute from multiple geographic regions.

Step 2: Monitor the Public Feedback Board

The health endpoint confirms the backend is running, but your customers interact with the public feedback board. A broken reverse proxy or misconfigured Nginx vhost can bring down the UI while the health endpoint on the direct port stays reachable.

Add a public board monitor:

1. Click New Monitor → HTTP in Vigilmon.
2. Set URL to https://feedback.example.com/ (your Fider homepage).
3. Set Expected status code to 200.
4. Under Advanced → Keyword check:
   • Keyword present: your product name or board title (e.g., "Feature Requests")
   • Keyword absent: 502 Bad Gateway, 503 Service Unavailable
5. Set Check interval to 60 seconds.
6. Save.

This monitor tests the complete path that customers experience: DNS → TLS → reverse proxy → Fider application → rendered feedback board.

Step 3: Monitor the Email Notification Service

Fider sends email notifications when someone votes on a post, a new comment is added, or an idea changes status. These notifications drive engagement — if SMTP fails silently, customers stop hearing back and assume their feedback was ignored.

Fider does not expose a dedicated SMTP health endpoint, but you can infer email delivery health by monitoring a lightweight API endpoint that touches the notification queue. Use the posts API as a proxy for application health:

1. Click New Monitor → HTTP in Vigilmon.
2. Set URL to https://feedback.example.com/api/v1/posts?limit=1.
3. Set Expected status code to 200.
4. Under Advanced → Keyword check:
   • Keyword absent: "error", "smtp", "connection refused"
5. Save.

For direct SMTP monitoring, if your SMTP relay exposes a health endpoint or you control the mail server, add a separate TCP monitor:

1. Click New Monitor → TCP in Vigilmon.
2. Set Host to your SMTP server hostname (e.g., mail.example.com).
3. Set Port to 587 (STARTTLS) or 465 (SMTPS).
4. Set Check interval to 120 seconds.
5. Save.

A TCP monitor confirms the SMTP port is accepting connections — the most common failure mode for transactional email is a refused connection on port 587.

Step 4: SSL Certificate Monitoring

Fider's feedback board is public-facing. A lapsed SSL certificate breaks access for every customer who tries to submit or vote on feedback — browsers will block the page entirely.

Vigilmon checks the TLS certificate automatically on every HTTPS monitor. Configure expiry alerts:

1. Open your /health monitor in Vigilmon.
2. Click Settings → SSL Certificate.
3. Set Alert when certificate expires in less than to 14 days.
4. Save.

For public customer-facing tools, certificate expiry is a reputational failure, not just a technical one. A 14-day warning gives you enough time to renew before customers notice.

Step 5: Alert Channels

Go to Notifications → New Channel in Vigilmon and configure:

• Email — immediate alerts to your devops or product team
• Webhook — post to Slack, Teams, or a PagerDuty integration

For Slack, a Fider health check failure looks like:

🔴 DOWN: feedback.example.com (/health)
Keyword "healthy" not found in response
Region: EU-Central
Triggered: 2026-04-02 09:15 UTC

When Fider recovers:

✅ RECOVERED: feedback.example.com
Downtime: 7 minutes

For a customer-facing feedback tool, alert both your engineering and product channels — product teams often notice user complaints in support channels before engineering notices a monitor firing.

Step 6: Status Page

Go to Status Pages → New Status Page in Vigilmon. Add your Fider monitors and publish the page. For a public feedback tool, a status page lets frustrated customers see whether the site is down for everyone:

<a href="https://vigilmon.online/status/<your-slug>">
  <img src="https://vigilmon.online/badge/<monitor-slug>" alt="Feedback Board Status" />
</a>

Link to your status page from Fider's footer or your main product website so customers can self-serve during outages.

What You've Built

| Scenario | How Vigilmon catches it | |---|---| | Fider process crash | Health monitor detects no response or 502 | | PostgreSQL database unreachable | Health endpoint returns non-200 or error body | | Reverse proxy (Nginx/Caddy) failure | Web UI monitor detects 502 Bad Gateway | | SMTP port refusing connections | TCP monitor on port 587 detects refused connection | | Public board returns error | Keyword monitor detects error strings in response | | SSL certificate expired | Vigilmon TLS check fires 14 days before expiry | | DNS misconfiguration | HTTP monitor detects DNS resolution failure |

Customer feedback is only valuable if customers can submit it. Keep your Fider instance monitored so every vote, comment, and idea gets through — and your team gets alerted the moment it can't.

Start monitoring your Fider instance today — register free at vigilmon.online.