A small server ran three small services. A status page, an RSS digest fed by cron, and an API that one mobile app depended on. Nothing critical, until a database filled its disk at 3 a.m. and all three went down together. Nobody noticed for nine hours. The postmortem was short and uncomfortable: no alerting, no history, no way to know when the silence started.
This is the case study of the fix. The constraint was real money — the services were cheap, so the monitoring had to be cheaper. The developer set a budget of zero dollars and one evening. The goal was a minimal uptime monitor: check three endpoints every sixty seconds, record every result in SQLite, and fire a webhook after two consecutive failures. No dashboard. No pager duty. No metrics pipeline.
The build used MonkeyCode, an open-source AI coding assistant. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach. At the time of writing, the project's free tier includes a 10-million-token model allowance and a free server option, and both played a role in the workflow. The model access wrote the scaffold; the server option gave the monitor a home. Token numbers and server terms can change, so the repository README is the only source of truth.
