I run a few side projects and I've gone through different stages of monitoring them. First it was just checking manually if the site loads. Then I added a simple curl ping in cron. Then I started tracking response times, certificate expiry, even visual changes on pages.

At some point I realized I was spending more time building monitoring than the actual product. Classic trap.

Curious what other devs use for keeping an eye on their stuff. Do you go with a hosted service, self-host something like Uptime Kuma, or just wing it with scripts?