Multi-site monitoring for indie publishers and SaaS operators

Why one dashboard beats a pile of logins

An indie publisher with several sites, or a SaaS operator with a marketing site plus the product, usually already has a login for each host, each analytics property, and each payments account. The work of “is everything okay this morning?” becomes a tour of those logins. Something quiet can wait until a reader writes in.

Multi-site monitoring puts that tour on one dashboard. DashCanopy is that dashboard for the sites you add to it. You see which sites answered the last health check, and you see visitor and revenue stats when those sites report them. Email notifications are on every paid plan. Faster checks, webhooks, and SMS are on the higher plans described below.

The point of one dashboard is repetition. The same screen, every day, with the same definitions: online means the last health check got a successful response, offline means it did not. You still go to the host when you need logs or a deploy, and you still go to the payments provider when you need a charge or a dispute. You stop using those consoles as the only way to learn that a site is down.

Publishers who ship on a schedule feel this most on launch morning. A new post, a new checkout, and a new subdomain can each live in a different project. A canopy that already lists every site makes the launch check a glance instead of a reconstruction of the portfolio from memory.

What to monitor across a small portfolio

Start with reachability. If the homepage, the app, or the docs host stops responding, nothing else on that property matters until it answers again. DashCanopy health checks cover the sites you connect, on the interval for your plan: every 10 minutes on Starter, every 5 minutes on Pro, and every 1 minute on Agency.

Next, look at the stats the sites already know how to report. Visitor and revenue tracking is included from Starter upward. A publisher can see whether a quiet site is quiet because traffic dropped or because the page never loaded. A SaaS operator can see the marketing site and the app side by side instead of inferring an outage from a payments chart alone.

Then decide how you want to hear about it. Email notifications are part of Starter. Pro adds webhook event ingestion and SMS alerts that use your own Twilio account. Agency keeps those and adds a REST API, up to 5 team members, white-label branding, and dedicated onboarding. AI features on every tier use a bring-your-own OpenAI key. DashCanopy calls the provider with that key server-side.

A practical setup for a five-site publisher is Starter: five sites, 10-minute checks, visitor and revenue stats, uptime badges, and email. A publisher who has grown past five sites, or who wants webhooks and SMS, is in Pro territory, up to 15 sites and 5-minute checks. An agency watching a client roster without a site cap is the Agency plan.

How the tiers match a growing portfolio

Starter is $19 per month, or $190 per year (about $15.83 per month when billed yearly). It monitors up to 5 sites with health checks every 10 minutes, visitor and revenue tracking, uptime status badges, email notifications, and AI features when you bring your own OpenAI key. One seat. The 7-day free trial is shown on the plan.

Pro is $69 per month, or $690 per year. It monitors up to 15 sites with health checks every 5 minutes. It includes everything in Starter, plus webhook event ingestion, SMS alerts with your own Twilio account, premium add-ons available to purchase, and priority support. The feature comparison lists one seat on Pro as well. The same 7-day trial is shown.

Agency is $149 per month, or $1,490 per year. It monitors unlimited sites with health checks every 1 minute. It includes everything in Pro, bring-your-own-key support for the keys the plan lists, REST API access, up to 5 team members, white-label branding, all premium add-ons included, and dedicated onboarding. The 7-day trial is shown on Agency too.

Moving up is a pricing-page choice, not a migration project you have to invent. Logged-in customers use Manage billing to open the Stripe Customer Portal for payment methods and cancellation. The cancel answer on this site walks through that path. Checkout is where the trial terms are confirmed before a card is charged.

A simple operating rhythm

Pick the plan whose site cap matches the portfolio you have this quarter, not the portfolio you hope to have in three years. Five sites or fewer can live on Starter. Between six and fifteen, Pro is the tier whose cap matches. Above that, Agency is the unlimited tier.

Connect every public host you actually operate: the publication, the store, the app, the docs, and any campaign subdomain that can expire without anyone noticing. Leave the health-check interval to the plan. Read email, and on Pro or Agency configure SMS with your own Twilio account if a text is how you want downtime to reach you.

Once a week, read the tiles for visitor and revenue stats rather than waiting for a single dramatic alert. Monitoring is the daily reachability check. Stats are the weekly “did the portfolio move?” check. Both belong on the same dashboard so the second does not require a second product login.

When the portfolio changes, update the site list the same day you add the property. A monitor that does not know about a new site cannot tell you that the new site is down. The command center is only as complete as the sites you have added.

Related reading

Plan limits and the product definition are on the other DashCanopy answer pages. Publishers who also follow industry coverage can read The Publishing Times.

• What is DashCanopy?
• Pricing and plan limits
• Versus checking provider dashboards one by one
• Compare plans on the pricing page
• The Publishing Times

Common questions

Short answers for the monitoring question. Plan dollars and feature rows match the pricing page.