tutorial

Monitoring Your Inferno.js App with Vigilmon: Health Checks, Heartbeats & Uptime Alerts

Add production-grade monitoring to an Inferno.js application — a health API, background job heartbeats, and instant alerts when your blazing-fast UI or backend goes down.

Inferno.js is one of the fastest JavaScript libraries available for building user interfaces — it mirrors React's API while delivering significantly higher rendering throughput. But that performance edge disappears the moment your app goes down, your API becomes unreachable, or a background worker fails silently. Vigilmon gives you the visibility layer you need: continuous HTTP monitoring, heartbeat checks, and instant alerts routed to email or Slack.

What You'll Build

  • A health API endpoint alongside your Inferno.js frontend
  • Vigilmon HTTP monitors for your SPA and backend
  • A heartbeat for scheduled background tasks
  • Alert channels (email and Slack)
  • An uptime badge embedded in your Inferno UI

Prerequisites

  • An Inferno.js project (Vite + inferno or an existing setup)
  • Node.js/Express backend for the health endpoint
  • A free Vigilmon account

Step 1: Add a Health Endpoint

Inferno.js is a pure frontend library, so health checks live on your Node/Express backend. Add a /health route:

// server.js (Express)
import express from "express";

const app = express();

app.get("/health", async (req, res) => {
  const checks = {};
  let degraded = false;

  // Database check
  try {
    // await db.query("SELECT 1");
    checks.database = "ok";
  } catch (err) {
    checks.database = `error: ${err.message}`;
    degraded = true;
  }

  // External API check
  try {
    const resp = await fetch("https://api.example.com/ping", {
      signal: AbortSignal.timeout(3000),
    });
    checks.externalApi = resp.ok ? "ok" : `http_${resp.status}`;
  } catch {
    checks.externalApi = "unreachable";
    degraded = true;
  }

  res.status(degraded ? 503 : 200).json({
    status: degraded ? "degraded" : "ok",
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
    checks,
  });
});

app.listen(process.env.PORT ?? 3000);

Test it:

curl http://localhost:3000/health | jq .
# {"status":"ok","timestamp":"2026-07-03T...","checks":{"database":"ok","externalApi":"ok"}}

Step 2: Configure Vigilmon HTTP Monitors

Log in to VigilmonMonitors → New Monitor:

Monitor 1: Inferno.js SPA

| Field | Value | |---|---| | URL | https://yourapp.com/ | | Method | GET | | Expected status | 200 | | Expected body | A stable string from your HTML (e.g. app title or <div id="app">) | | Check interval | 1 minute |

Monitor 2: Health API

| Field | Value | |---|---| | URL | https://yourapp.com/health | | Method | GET | | Expected status | 200 | | Check interval | 1 minute |

With both monitors you cover two independent failure planes: CDN/static serving and backend/data layer.


Step 3: Heartbeat for Background Tasks

Scheduled jobs — cache warm-up, data ingestion, email digests — can fail silently for hours. A Vigilmon heartbeat catches this by alerting when the expected ping doesn't arrive on time.

npm install node-cron
// scheduler.js
import cron from "node-cron";

const VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL = process.env.VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL ?? "";

async function pingHeartbeat() {
  if (!VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL) return;
  try {
    await fetch(VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL, { signal: AbortSignal.timeout(5000) });
  } catch {
    // Monitoring must never crash the job
  }
}

cron.schedule("*/10 * * * *", async () => {
  try {
    await runDataIngestion();
    await pingHeartbeat();
  } catch (err) {
    console.error("[scheduler] Job failed:", err);
    // Vigilmon alerts when the heartbeat window expires with no ping
  }
});

async function runDataIngestion() {
  // Your actual job logic
}

Set up the heartbeat in Vigilmon:

  1. Monitors → New Heartbeat Monitor
  2. Set Expected interval to 20 minutes (2× the cron interval as grace window)
  3. Copy the ping URL to your .env:
VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL=https://vigilmon.online/api/heartbeat/xxxxxxxx

Step 4: Display Uptime Status in Your Inferno.js UI

Inferno's Component API is nearly identical to React's, so the status badge component will feel familiar:

// src/components/StatusBadge.jsx
import { Component } from "inferno";

const BADGE_URL = "https://vigilmon.online/api/badge/your-monitor-id.svg";
const STATUS_URL = "https://vigilmon.online/status/your-monitor-slug";

export class StatusBadge extends Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = { loaded: false };
  }

  render() {
    const { loaded } = this.state;
    return (
      <a
        href={STATUS_URL}
        target="_blank"
        rel="noopener noreferrer"
        aria-label="Service uptime status"
      >
        <img
          src={BADGE_URL}
          alt="Uptime"
          width={120}
          height={20}
          onLoad={() => this.setState({ loaded: true })}
          style={{ opacity: loaded ? 1 : 0, transition: "opacity 0.2s" }}
        />
      </a>
    );
  }
}

Add it to your app footer:

// src/App.jsx
import { render } from "inferno";
import { StatusBadge } from "./components/StatusBadge";

function App() {
  return (
    <div>
      <main>{/* your routes */}</main>
      <footer>
        <StatusBadge />
      </footer>
    </div>
  );
}

render(<App />, document.getElementById("app"));

Step 5: Set Up Alert Channels

In Vigilmon's Alert Channels settings:

Email

  1. Alert Channels → Email → add your on-call email
  2. Attach to both HTTP monitors and the heartbeat

Slack

  1. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook for #alerts
  2. Alert Channels → Webhook → paste the URL
  3. Payload template:
{
  "text": "🚨 *{{ monitor.name }}* is DOWN\n{{ monitor.url }}\nStatus: {{ event.status }}\n<https://vigilmon.online|Open Vigilmon>"
}

Step 6: Verify Everything Works

# 1. Health endpoint responds correctly
curl -s https://yourapp.com/health | jq .

# 2. Break the DB connection string → confirm health returns 503
# Expected: Vigilmon alerts within 2 minutes

# 3. Remove VIGILMON_HEARTBEAT_URL → let the scheduler run without pinging
# Expected: heartbeat alert fires after the grace window

# 4. Vigilmon → "Test Alert" → confirm delivery to Slack/email

Summary

| Monitor | What It Catches | |---|---| | HTTP SPA check | CDN failures, broken static deploys | | HTTP health API | Database, cache, and third-party API failures | | Heartbeat | Scheduler crashes, silent background job failures |


Next Steps

  • Create separate monitors for staging vs. production environments
  • Use Vigilmon's response time graphs to correlate API latency with Inferno.js rendering bottlenecks
  • Configure multi-channel alerting: email for low-severity, Slack for critical incidents

Ready to get started? Sign up for Vigilmon free — have your first monitor running in under 5 minutes.

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