tutorial

How to Monitor FireHydrant with Vigilmon

How to monitor FireHydrant with Vigilmon — API health checks, runbook webhook availability, status page uptime, and SSL certificate alerts for your incident reliability platform.

FireHydrant is the incident management and reliability platform that engineering teams use to maintain a service catalog, run structured incident response runbooks, route alerts automatically, publish real-time status pages, and capture retrospective data — with native integrations for Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, and PagerDuty. When FireHydrant's API is down, runbook automation stalls, alert routing stops triggering incident channels, and the service catalog becomes stale. Vigilmon gives you external visibility into FireHydrant's availability: the REST API, runbook webhook endpoints, customer status page, and SSL certificates, so your reliability platform is never silently degraded when an incident is escalating.

What You'll Build

  • An HTTP monitor on FireHydrant's API health endpoint
  • A webhook endpoint monitor to verify runbook automation is receiving triggers
  • A status page availability check for customer-facing outages
  • SSL certificate monitoring for your FireHydrant domain
  • An alerting setup that distinguishes API failures from integration failures

Prerequisites

  • A FireHydrant account with API access
  • Your FireHydrant organization subdomain (e.g., app.firehydrant.io)
  • FireHydrant API token from Organization Settings → API Keys
  • A free account at vigilmon.online

Step 1: Understand FireHydrant's Health Endpoints

FireHydrant exposes a health check endpoint at its API base URL:

curl https://api.firehydrant.io/v1/ping
# Returns: {"data":"pong"} on a healthy system

You can also check the application layer directly:

curl -I https://app.firehydrant.io
# Returns HTTP 200 when the web application is available

A non-200 or a connection timeout from the API means incident declarations, runbook triggers, and alert routing are all non-functional.

Step 2: Create a Vigilmon HTTP Monitor for the API

  1. Log in to Vigilmon → Add Monitor → HTTP.
  2. URL: https://api.firehydrant.io/v1/ping.
  3. Check interval: 60 seconds.
  4. Response timeout: 15 seconds.
  5. Expected status: 200.
  6. Keyword: pong (present in a healthy FireHydrant API response).
  7. Label: FireHydrant API health.
  8. Click Save.

This monitor catches:

  • FireHydrant cloud API outages and scheduled maintenance windows
  • Database connection failures causing 5xx responses from the Rails API
  • Network routing issues between your infrastructure and api.firehydrant.io
  • Deployment failures after FireHydrant platform upgrades

Alert sensitivity: Set to trigger after 1 consecutive failure. When the FireHydrant API is unavailable, incident declarations via Slack commands fail, PagerDuty alert routing stops creating incidents, and on-call engineers have no structured response workflow.

Step 3: Monitor the Runbook Webhook Endpoint

FireHydrant runbooks can receive webhook triggers from external monitoring tools (Prometheus AlertManager, Datadog, Grafana). If the webhook endpoint is unreachable, automated runbook execution stops:

# Verify the inbound webhook endpoint is listening
curl -I https://api.firehydrant.io/v1/integrations/webhooks
# Expect 401 (auth required) — confirms the endpoint is up

Find your specific inbound webhook URL in FireHydrant → Integrations → Webhooks:

  1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
  2. URL: Your FireHydrant inbound webhook URL (from integration settings).
  3. Check interval: 2 minutes.
  4. Response timeout: 10 seconds.
  5. Expected status: 200 or 401.
  6. Label: FireHydrant webhook receiver.
  7. Click Save.

A 401 response confirms the webhook endpoint is running and requiring authentication — this is correct behavior. A 502 or connection refused means the endpoint is not accepting connections and automated runbook triggers will fail silently.

Step 4: Monitor the Service Catalog Endpoint

FireHydrant's service catalog is a critical dependency for runbooks and alert routing — incidents are automatically attached to services based on the catalog. Monitor the catalog API to verify this layer is functioning:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" https://api.firehydrant.io/v1/services
# Returns paginated list of services
  1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
  2. URL: https://api.firehydrant.io/v1/services.
  3. HTTP headers: Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN.
  4. Check interval: 5 minutes.
  5. Response timeout: 15 seconds.
  6. Expected status: 200.
  7. Keyword: data (present in all valid FireHydrant API list responses).
  8. Label: FireHydrant service catalog API.
  9. Click Save.

Step 5: Monitor the Customer Status Page

FireHydrant publishes real-time status pages for your customers. If your status page is down during an incident, customers have no visibility into the outage:

curl https://status.yourcompany.com
# Returns HTML with current status indicators
  1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
  2. URL: https://status.yourcompany.com (your FireHydrant-powered status page).
  3. Check interval: 2 minutes.
  4. Response timeout: 15 seconds.
  5. Expected status: 200.
  6. Keyword: Operational or your company name.
  7. Label: FireHydrant customer status page.
  8. Click Save.

If the status page monitor fires while the FireHydrant API health monitor stays green, the issue is in the status page CDN or custom domain configuration — not the incident management backend. This distinction speeds up diagnosis significantly during an active incident.

Step 6: Monitor SSL Certificates

FireHydrant's API and all webhook deliveries require valid TLS. An expired certificate silently breaks every PagerDuty, Prometheus, and Datadog integration:

openssl s_client -connect api.firehydrant.io:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
  1. Add Monitor → SSL Certificate.
  2. Domain: api.firehydrant.io.
  3. Alert when expiry is within: 30 days.
  4. Alert again: 14 days, 7 days, 3 days.
  5. Click Save.

Add a second certificate monitor for your status page domain:

  1. Domain: status.yourcompany.com.
  2. Same thresholds.
  3. Label: FireHydrant status page SSL.

Step 7: Configure Alerting

In Vigilmon under Settings → Notifications, configure your alert channels:

| Monitor | Trigger | Runbook action | |---|---|---| | API health | Non-200 or keyword missing | Check FireHydrant status page; switch to manual Slack incident coordination | | Webhook receiver | Connection error or 5xx | Check webhook logs; manually acknowledge incoming alerts from Prometheus/Datadog | | Service catalog API | Non-200 or keyword missing | Service-to-runbook mapping may be stale; verify database health | | Customer status page | Non-200 | Check CDN configuration; notify customer success team of status page outage | | SSL certificate | < 30 days to expiry | Renew certificate; verify auto-renewal pipeline (cert-manager or Let's Encrypt) |

Alert after: 1 consecutive failure for API health and webhook monitors. 2 consecutive failures for status page and service catalog monitors.

Escalation: Route API health alerts to your SRE Slack channel and PagerDuty on-call rotation. If FireHydrant itself is the system that manages your on-call escalation, have a fallback contact path (direct manager Slack DM, phone tree) since FireHydrant-managed escalations will also be down.

Common FireHydrant Failure Modes and What Vigilmon Catches

| Scenario | Vigilmon monitor | |---|---| | FireHydrant API outage | API health fires; all incident declarations and runbooks stall | | Webhook endpoint down | Webhook monitor fires; Prometheus/Datadog alerts stop auto-creating incidents | | Status page CDN failure | Status page monitor fires; customers have no outage visibility | | Service catalog API degraded | Catalog monitor fires; runbook service attachments may fail | | SSL certificate expired | SSL monitor fires; all integrations fail with TLS handshake errors | | FireHydrant deployment failure | API health fires temporarily; watch for recovery within 5 minutes | | DNS misconfiguration | All monitors fire simultaneously | | Retrospective template endpoint down | API health green; specific feature unavailable — verify manually |

FireHydrant is your reliability platform's backbone — when it fails, incident response reverts to improvised Slack coordination without structured runbooks, service context, or automated status page updates. Vigilmon gives you external monitoring across every critical layer of FireHydrant so you know immediately when your incident management platform needs attention, and can activate backup procedures before your next major outage.

Start monitoring FireHydrant in under 5 minutes — register free at vigilmon.online.

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