Keeping your events platform reliable means catching issues before they affect your users. This guide outlines how to set up monitoring and alerting for The Events Calendar to detect failures early, improve uptime, and maintain system health across all event-related operations.
Why Monitoring Matters
Even a well-optimized site can experience intermittent issues such as:
- Failed ticket or RSVP emails
- Broken imports or feed connections
- Checkout or payment gateway errors
- Delayed background tasks (cron or Action Scheduler)
- Plugin conflicts after updates
By setting up proper monitoring and alerting, you can identify and resolve these issues before they cause downtime or customer frustration.
What to Monitor
A good monitoring setup should cover core site health, event processes, and integration reliability.
1. Site & Server Health
Track performance and uptime using tools like:
- UptimeRobot, Better Uptime, or Pingdom alerts for downtime or slow response.
- WordPress Site Health identifies PHP errors or outdated configurations.
- Query Monitor detects slow database queries related to event rendering.
If your host supports it, enable server resource monitoring (CPU, RAM, and disk I/O) to detect overloads that can slow down large event imports.
2. Event & Ticketing Processes
Enable built-in logging under: Events → Settings → Logging → Enable Logging
Monitor:
- Failed ticket creation or order syncs
- RSVP responses not being saved
- Event import or aggregation errors
Review the error log regularly to see if there are potential errors.
3. Email & Communication Systems
Set up transactional email monitoring for:
- Ticket receipts
- RSVP confirmations
- Event reminders (Promoter campaigns)
Use mail delivery services like Postmark, SendGrid, or Amazon SES with dashboards and alerts for:
- Bounce or failure rates above the threshold
- API key or sender domain issues
- Rate-limiting warnings
4. Background Jobs (WP Cron & Action Scheduler)
Background jobs power:
- Ticket email dispatch
- Promoter campaign delivery
- Aggregator imports
Monitor these with:
- Using WP Crontrol to review pending or failed cron events
- Action Scheduler plugin can inspect failed or stuck actions
5. Integrations & APIs
If you use external feeds or connected services:
- Watch for HTTP 4xx / 5xx errors from APIs.
- Use Better Stack Logs or Sentry.io for error tracking.
- Configure retries for transient errors.