Why Dependency Tracking Matters
Modern applications depend on a web of services — your own APIs, third-party providers, databases, CDNs, and more. When an outage occurs, understanding these dependencies is the difference between a 5-minute diagnosis and a 2-hour investigation.
Alert24 helps you map these dependencies so you can:
- Quickly assess blast radius when a service goes down
- Trace root causes by following the dependency chain
- Plan for resilience by identifying single points of failure
- Communicate accurately about what's affected during incidents
How Dependencies Work in Alert24
Dependencies are represented through the relationship between applications and services. When you add services to an application, you're declaring that the application depends on those services.
Example Dependency Map
Customer Portal (Application)
├── Web Frontend (Service) — your code
├── REST API (Service) — your code
├── PostgreSQL (Service) — managed database
├── Cloudflare CDN (Service) — third-party
├── Stripe Payments (Service) — third-party
└── SendGrid Email (Service) — third-party
If Cloudflare CDN experiences an issue, you can immediately see that your Customer Portal is affected.
Setting Up Dependencies
1. Create Services for Everything You Depend On
Don't just create services for your own infrastructure. Create services for every third-party provider your application relies on:
- Cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly)
- Payment processing (Stripe, PayPal)
- Email delivery (SendGrid, Postmark)
- Authentication providers (Auth0, Okta)
2. Add Monitoring to Third-Party Services
For each third-party service, set up a Status Page Check. Alert24 monitors over 40 providers automatically, so you'll know when they have issues without manually checking their status pages.
3. Group Services into Applications
Add all relevant services — both internal and external — to the appropriate application. This creates a complete dependency map.
4. Review the Dependency View
When you open an application, you can see all its services and their current status at a glance. This is your dependency map in action.
[Screenshot: Application dependency view]
Identifying Single Points of Failure
Review your applications and look for services that appear critical but lack redundancy:
- Is there only one database with no failover?
- Does your entire application depend on a single third-party provider?
- Are there services without monitoring checks?
Alert24 helps you identify these gaps by showing unmonitored services and highlighting services that are dependencies for multiple applications.
During an Incident
When a service reports a problem, check which applications include that service. This immediately tells you:
- What products or systems are affected
- Which teams need to be notified
- What to communicate on your status page
- What the customer impact is
This structured approach to dependency tracking transforms incident response from reactive guesswork into informed decision-making.