A heartbeat metric that tracks the core user action tells you if your product is truly working, cutting through noisy uptime graphs and forcing teams to notice failures fast.
A heartbeat metric is a single, user-facing number that shows whether the product is delivering the core value customers came for. When it flatlines you know in minutes that something essential has broken, regardless of server uptime or log volume.
Most teams obsess over infrastructure signals - uptime, CPU, request rates - which look good until the user experience collapses. Alex points out that e-commerce checkout per minute, SaaS task completions, or build completions are far more predictive of real health. By picking the one action that would disappear first, you get an early warning system that cuts through noise.
The advice is simple: start with one metric, display it prominently, and ignore the rest until you need more detail. This forces the organization to own the outcome, speeds up incident response, and keeps leadership honest about product performance. Layers of dashboards can be added later, but the heartbeat metric remains the litmus test for whether the service is alive.
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