Hey there, hope you’ve had a good week!

This week I’m talking about running, scaling and monitoring nocode Bubble applications.

Part of running a successful SaaS business is ensuring your application is reliable and is a tool your users can depend on.

Traditional software development has an abundance of tools that make this easy to manage, with tools like application monitoring and UX analytics.

The good news is - nocode development is no different.

It’s possible to build a resilient SaaS without code that you can be confident is always performing for your customers.

Some of the tools & strategies I use to monitor my #NoCodeSaaS

Some of the tools & strategies I use to monitor my #NoCodeSaaS

I’m going to share with you some of the tools and strategies I use to monitor my own SaaS built on Bubble - UserLoop.

I’ve managed to get the app to be extremely resilient, sending out thousands of customer surveys every month reliably without issue.

And if an issue with the app does arise, I’m alerted straight away.

Here’s how 👇

Slack Monitoring

One of the most powerful techniques I use for monitoring the status of my Bubble app is custom Slack notifications.

I send alerts to my personal Slack channel whenever users undertake key tasks in my app.

This gives me a second by second feed of everything that’s happening, and allows me to quickly identify if there are problems.

Slack user activity feed for UserLoop

To achieve this, I have integrated the Slack API within my application and created a backend workflow called slack-internal.

I then call that API workflow from my other backend workflows throughout my app.

Some examples of events I monitor for are…

User signs up
User uninstalls the app
User invites a colleague
A survey is sent
A response is recieved
A user recieves a message

This is a really powerful way of monitoring the activity on your app and ensuring everything is running smoothly.

I always know exactly what users are doing in my app at any time!

Statuspage & Bubble Platform Alerts

The next tool I use is Statuspage. This is a fantastic service that you can start using for free which helps you monitor your application’s uptime and communicate it with users.

UserLoop's Statuspage

The best thing about Statuspage is that it already has access to information about key services your app might use - including Bubble!

This means you can set your statuspage not only to monitor your own app but the underlying platforms and APIs your app uses.

So if Bubble goes down or is having issues, your status page will automatically update and tell your users.

Here’s a link to my statuspage for UserLoop….

As you can see it has uptime info about…

UserLoop’s API
UserLoop Platform
Bubble Main Cluster
Sendgrid API
Shopify API
Shopify Third party services

That means, if any of these services go down, my users will be updated of exactly what is going on.

You can even add the statuspage widget to Intercom so users can immediately see if there’s an issue.

Current App Status Shown in Intercom Statuspage Widget

Current App Status Shown in Intercom Statuspage Widget

Pro Tip:

I highly recommend subscribing to updates from the Bubble Status page, you can have them feed directly into a Slack channel.

So when Bubble has issues with their platform, you’re immediately notified and know when the issue is resolved.

User Interface Monitoring

The other thing I highly recommend implementing in your app is User Interface monitoring using a tool like Logrocket, Fullstory or UserReplay.

These tools give you a clear view of exactly what users are doing in your app and can be invaluable for debugging user and technical issues.

Logrocket monitoring the UserLoop Bubble App

Logrocket monitoring the UserLoop Bubble App

I recommend integrating these elements in your Bubble app using a reusable HTML element which you add to all the pages you want to monitor.

In my app I have two reusable HTML elements…

Services (Logged Out) - This contains all the scripts I want to run for logged out users, things like Intercom & Logrocket.
Services (Logged In) - This contains scripts I only want to run for logged-in users, it means I can also inject things like the user’s email address, ID and name into the JS tags to make them easier to identify customer issues.

API Monitoring

I’ve built APIs for several of my Bubble Apps. This lets my users interact with the app programmatically over an API.

As you probably guessed, UserLoop’s API is entirely powered by Bubble, and I’m going to cover that more fully in a future newsletter!

I use Postman’s free API monitoring service to automatically test all my app’s API endpoints every day on a schedule.

I get an automated email telling me if all my API endpoints are working correctly, and how long they are taking to respond.

UserLoop's API being monitored daily by Postman

UserLoop's API being monitored daily by Postman

Third-party monitoring via API

It’s likely your app is going to be relying on some third-party services to do things like sending out emails, SMS messages or notifications.

You may want to monitor for potential problems with those other services.

For example, my app allows customers to send out email surveys.

To achieve this, I use the Postmark email service.

If someone flags a survey one of my customers sends as spam, I want to know about it to protect my sender reputation.

So to achieve this, I’ve integrated Postmark’s webhook spam report notifications into Bubble using an API workflow.

This means that if I ever receive a spam report, a Bubble workflow runs and I am notified straight away through Slack.

You can do this same kind of thing with many web services, using Bubble as a router to collect and relay the reports to you.

Thank you! 🙌

Hope you found this issue helpful, please to reply to this email and let me know!

I also hugely appreciate if you want to share this with your friends or on Twitter.

I love helping others in the nocode community build amazing stuff so the more I can spread the word the better!

As always, you can hit me up over on Twitter.

Until next time, happy building!

James

📊 NoCode application monitoring, version…