The Hund Blog
Choosing Your Application Monitoring Software: 5 Critical Features You’re Overlooking
When you’re choosing application monitoring software, it’s easy to get distracted by dashboards, graphs, and alert types. But at the evaluation stage, those surface features rarely tell the full story. The best application monitoring tools don’t just tell you that something is wrong. They help you respond faster, communicate clearly, and maintain trust while you fix the problem.
When comparing modern application monitoring platforms, it's worth considering more than just uptime checks and notification integrations. The real value lies in a platform's automation, developer controls, and communication capabilities.
Here are five critical features that many teams overlook when evaluating monitoring software, and why they matter if you’re serious about reliability and user trust.
1. The Automation Engine (Not Just Alerts)
Most monitoring tools are built around sending alerts. When an incident occurs, they fire off a Slack message or an email and stop there. The hard work (notifying stakeholders, updating users, and posting to your status page) still happens manually. That’s where time is lost and mistakes creep in.
A modern monitoring platform should have a true automation engine at its core. When a service fails, it should automatically update your public status page and kick off the communication workflow, eliminating the delay between detection and transparency.
This principle of reducing manual work, often called "reducing toil," comes straight from Google’s SRE framework. Hund.io was designed with that same idea in mind. Its integrated monitoring automatically updates component statuses the moment an issue is confirmed, so your users stay informed while your team focuses on resolution.
2. A Developer-First API and IaC Support
As your infrastructure grows, managing your monitoring setup through a web interface becomes risky. It’s too easy for the configuration to drift from what’s actually deployed. When your monitoring and communication layers live separately from your infrastructure-as-code (IaC), you lose consistency.
A developer-first platform solves this by letting you manage everything programmatically. Hund.io offers a complete API and an official Terraform provider, allowing you to define your monitoring and status page configuration as code. This keeps your communication layer in sync with your infrastructure, versioned, and fully automated within your CI/CD pipelines.
When monitoring is code-driven, you can deploy confidently knowing that your visibility and communication stack evolve in lockstep with your applications.
3. A Deep and Flexible Incident Workflow
Real-world incidents aren’t binary. A database might be slow, a load balancer might be under attack, or a single feature might be degraded while the rest of the app works fine. Most tools still limit you to “Degraded” and “Maintenance.” That lack of nuance frustrates users and overburdens support.
A flexible incident workflow gives you language that fits reality. With Hund.io, you can define custom statuses like “Performance Degraded,” “Limited Connectivity,” or “Power Outage.” These distinctions help you communicate accurately and keep customers calm during outages.
Clear, transparent updates reduce inbound support requests and strengthen user trust, which are both critical outcomes when evaluating application monitoring software at scale.
4. Accessible Governance and Security (Without a Massive Price Jump)
Security and governance features like single sign-on and audit logs are essential once your team grows, but many monitoring vendors hide them behind expensive enterprise plans. That leaves fast-growing companies choosing between cost and compliance (a nearly impossible tradeoff).
Hund.io takes a different approach. Governance features like detailed audit logs are standard, and SSO is available as an affordable, predictable add-on. Pricing is transparent, not punitive. This philosophy ensures that security is never treated as a luxury upgrade but as a core part of your operational foundation.
When evaluating monitoring tools, always look for a vendor that values accessibility over upsells.
5. A True Communication Platform (Not a Monitoring Add-On)
In many application performance monitoring tools, the status page is a secondary feature or a quick add-on that looks fine until you need it most. These basic pages can’t manage complex incident workflows or offer the flexibility teams need during real downtime.
Hund.io was built from the ground up as a communication platform first. Monitoring is integrated into that foundation, not the other way around. Every feature is designed to support clear, reliable communication from the first alert to the postmortem.
A dedicated status page platform helps you control the narrative, maintain transparency, and protect your brand reputation when performance falters. That’s something an add-on will never do well.
Choosing the Right Application Monitoring Software
When you look beyond the dashboard, you’ll see that the best application monitoring tools share a common goal: reducing manual work, improving communication, and building trust. By focusing on automation, developer-first APIs, flexible workflows, accessible security, and purpose-built communication, you’ll choose software that supports your entire incident lifecycle, not just your alerts.