When production starts failing, one of the first questions is also one of the most expensive to answer badly: Is our application broken, or is a provider we depend on having an incident? If the dependency is AWS, Cloudflare, GitHub, OpenAI, Stripe, or another cloud or SaaS vendor, there are two common approaches: Read the provider's official status page. Probe the service yourself. Neither is enough on its own. A useful monitoring setup treats them as separate signals. I...