Support paste: "Site is down." You open the dashboard. All green. The wrong response is "works for me." The right response is a short investigation that assumes they are describing something real.
Start with their facts
- Exact URL
- Error text or screenshot
- Approximate location / ISP
- Browser vs mobile app vs API client
- Since when
"Down" might mean login loop, blank page, 403, slow spin, or payment failure. Those are different incidents.
Triage order that usually works
- Reproduce off your office network: phone cellular, or a colleague in another city.
- Look per region on your monitors and CDN analytics. Green in Virginia and red for them in Sydney is a story (everyone vs just me).
- Check auth and the specific flow: homepage up, checkout dead is still an outage for them.
- Check third parties on that path: IdP, payments, email magic links.
- Check their side gently: corporate VPN, DNS filter, extension. Offer a status link and a second device test without blaming.
When monitors were wrong
Your checks hit /health while customers hit /app. Your check allows 200s that are error pages (content checks). Your interval missed a ten-minute blip. Own it, fix the coverage, thank them.
When monitors were right
Something local or account-specific broke. Help them anyway. Update status only if impact is broader; do not flip the public page for one ISP.
Afterward
If this happens twice on the same path, you have a monitoring gap. Add the URL. Widen regions. Tighten what "success" means. Green dashboards that regularly disagree with customers are not a comfort; they are a liability.
