Monitor Render Services

Real-time monitoring of Render services including health checks, performance metrics, and logs.

When to Use This Skill

Activate this skill when users want to:

• Check if services are healthy
• View performance metrics
• Monitor logs
• Verify a deployment is working
• Investigate slow performance
• Check database health

Render Access

Before reading service state, logs, metrics, or database health, follow references/render-access.md to establish access and verify the intended workspace. Prefer MCP when available; the CLI can provide service status and logs, while metrics and database queries require MCP.

Before interpreting deploy or health-check state, read references/deployments.md.

---

Quick Health Check

Run these 5 checks to assess service health:

# 1. Check service status
list_services()

# 2. Check latest deploy
list_deploys(serviceId: "<service-id>", limit: 1)

# 3. Check for errors
list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], level: ["error"], limit: 20)

# 4. Check resource usage
get_metrics(resourceId: "<service-id>", metricTypes: ["cpu_usage", "memory_usage"])

# 5. Check latency
get_metrics(resourceId: "<service-id>", metricTypes: ["http_latency"], httpLatencyQuantile: 0.95)

---

Service Health

Check Status

list_services()

get_service(serviceId: "<id>")

Check Deployments

list_deploys(serviceId: "<service-id>", limit: 5)

Follow references/deployments.md to interpret asynchronous and terminal states, identify the specific deploy, and verify the workload after it becomes live.

Check Errors

list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], level: ["error"], limit: 50)

list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], statusCode: ["500", "502", "503"], limit: 50)

---

Performance Metrics

CPU & Memory

get_metrics(
  resourceId: "<service-id>",
  metricTypes: ["cpu_usage", "memory_usage", "cpu_limit", "memory_limit"]
)

Metric	Healthy	Warning	Critical
CPU	<70%	70-85%	>85%
Memory	<80%	80-90%	>90%

HTTP Latency

get_metrics(
  resourceId: "<service-id>",
  metricTypes: ["http_latency"],
  httpLatencyQuantile: 0.95
)

p95 Latency	Status
<200ms	Excellent
200-500ms	Good
500ms-1s	Concerning
>1s	Problem

Request Count

get_metrics(
  resourceId: "<service-id>",
  metricTypes: ["http_request_count"]
)

Filter by Endpoint

get_metrics(
  resourceId: "<service-id>",
  metricTypes: ["http_latency"],
  httpPath: "/api/users"
)

Detailed metrics guide: references/metrics-guide.md

---

Database Monitoring

PostgreSQL Status

list_postgres_instances()
get_postgres(postgresId: "<postgres-id>")

Connection Count

get_metrics(resourceId: "<postgres-id>", metricTypes: ["active_connections"])

Query Database

query_render_postgres(
  postgresId: "<postgres-id>",
  sql: "SELECT state, count(*) FROM pg_stat_activity GROUP BY state"
)

Find Slow Queries

query_render_postgres(
  postgresId: "<postgres-id>",
  sql: "SELECT query, mean_exec_time FROM pg_stat_statements ORDER BY mean_exec_time DESC LIMIT 10"
)

Key-Value Store

list_key_value()
get_key_value(keyValueId: "<kv-id>")

---

Log Monitoring

Recent Logs

list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], limit: 100)

Error Logs

list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], level: ["error"], limit: 50)

Search Logs

list_logs(resource: ["<service-id>"], text: ["timeout", "error"], limit: 50)

Filter by Time

list_logs(
  resource: ["<service-id>"],
  startTime: "2024-01-15T10:00:00Z",
  endTime: "2024-01-15T11:00:00Z"
)

Stream Logs (CLI)

render logs -r <service-id> --tail -o text

---

Quick Reference

MCP Tools

# Services
list_services()
get_service(serviceId: "<id>")
list_deploys(serviceId: "<id>", limit: 5)

# Logs
list_logs(resource: ["<id>"], level: ["error"], limit: 100)
list_logs(resource: ["<id>"], text: ["search"], limit: 50)

# Metrics
get_metrics(resourceId: "<id>", metricTypes: ["cpu_usage", "memory_usage"])
get_metrics(resourceId: "<id>", metricTypes: ["http_latency"], httpLatencyQuantile: 0.95)
get_metrics(resourceId: "<id>", metricTypes: ["http_request_count"])

# Database
list_postgres_instances()
get_postgres(postgresId: "<id>")
query_render_postgres(postgresId: "<id>", sql: "SELECT ...")
get_metrics(resourceId: "<postgres-id>", metricTypes: ["active_connections"])

# Key-Value
list_key_value()
get_key_value(keyValueId: "<id>")

CLI Commands (Fallback)

Use these if MCP tools are unavailable:

# Service status
render services -o json
render services instances <service-id>

# Deployments
render deploys list <service-id> -o json

# Logs
render logs -r <service-id> --tail -o text          # Stream logs
render logs -r <service-id> --level error -o json   # Error logs
render logs -r <service-id> --type deploy -o json   # Build logs

# Database
render psql <database-id>                           # Connect to PostgreSQL

# SSH for live debugging
render ssh <service-id>

Healthy Service Indicators

Indicator	Healthy	Warning	Critical
Error Rate	<0.1%	0.1-1%	>1%
p95 Latency	<500ms	500ms-2s	>2s
CPU Usage	<70%	70-90%	>90%
Memory Usage	<80%	80-95%	>95%

---

References

• Render access: references/render-access.md
• Compute plans: references/compute-plans.md
• Deployments: references/deployments.md
• Metrics guide: references/metrics-guide.md

Related Skills

• render-deploy — Deploy new applications to Render
• render-debug — Diagnose and fix deployment failures
• render-mcp — MCP server setup and capability discovery

Current documentation retrieval

Whenever this skill directs you to consult current Render documentation:

1. Retrieve the linked Markdown document directly with an available URL-fetching tool or HTTP client, such as curl. Do not substitute web-search summaries for the document.
2. Confirm that retrieval succeeded and returned the expected document, then read its contents. Saving a file or printing its path is not sufficient.
3. If the request fails or your tool cannot read the Markdown response, open and read the linked HTML version instead.
4. If neither version can be retrieved, disclose that the current reference is unavailable and follow any topic-specific fallback in the skill. Use bundled guidance only for stable constraints, and do not guess at changeable platform details.

When a task requires multiple references, apply this workflow to each one and distinguish the documents you verified from those that remain unavailable.