Monitoring Without Micromanaging: Let the Robot Run While You Sleep—Catch Errors Fast
If automation is the discipline engine, monitoring is the safety net. The goal isn’t to hover over your bot like a nervous parent; it’s to set up lightweight, reliable guardrails so problems surface fast—without you babysitting every tick.
You don’t need a mission control center with 12 screens. You need a small set of signals that answer two questions 24/7:
- “Is my system healthy?”
- “Are orders executing exactly as intended?”
This post shows you how to build that signal set—practical, cheap, and boring (in the best way).
The principle: observe outcomes, not vibes
Discretionary traders stare at charts to “feel” what’s happening. Automated traders watch system states and order outcomes. That means you define what “healthy” looks like in measurable terms and let software watch it continuously.
Examples of observable states:
- Runtime health: VPS online, bot process alive, CPU/RAM in expected range.
- Connectivity: Broker API reachable, auth token valid, acceptable latency.
- Market data: Feed connected, timestamps fresh (no stale prices).
- Orders: Signals received, orders sent, acknowledgments received, fills matched.
- Risk: Position sizing within limits; no orphan positions; P/L within a daily loss guardrail.
When you think this way, “monitoring” becomes a checklist your tools can verify automatically.
The “minimum viable monitoring” kit
You can stand up a robust monitoring layer with very little money and a half-day of work:
1) Heartbeat pings
- A simple script sends a ping (HTTP request) every minute to a heartbeat service (e.g., healthchecks.io or a DIY endpoint).
- If pings stop, you get an email/SMS/Telegram alert.
- Monitors: VPS uptime, bot process liveness, cron tasks.
2) Broker/API health
- A 60-second loop checks: “Can I authenticate? Can I place a tiny paper order? Can I cancel it?” (paper or sandbox only).
- If auth fails or latency spikes beyond your SLO (say 750ms), alert.
3) Order lifecycle audit
- Every real trade logs four events: signal in, order out, broker ack, fill.
- A reconciler process checks that each signal transitions through all states within a time window. Missing transitions trigger an alert.
4) Price freshness
- If the latest price timestamp drifts beyond N seconds vs. real time, alert for stale data (common with data hiccups).
5) Daily risk guardrails
- Hard stops: Max daily loss (e.g., -X%), max position size, max leverage, max orders per hour.
- If breached, halt the strategy and alert.
That’s it. Small, boring, effective.
Dashboards you actually use (Prometheus + Grafana)
“Dashboards” should mean one glance = confidence. A clean Grafana board can show:
- Service panel: bot up/down, uptime %, last heartbeat.
- Latency: broker API round-trip, data feed delay.
- Orders: sent vs filled, open vs closed, stuck-in-“submitted”.
- Risk: current exposure, margin usage, realized P/L vs daily limit.
- Error budget: % of time within target latency, % orders filled within X seconds.
Prometheus scrapes metrics your bot exposes (e.g., /metrics endpoint). Grafana graphs them. You set alert rules (e.g., latency > 1s for 5 mins = page me).
Pro tip: Keep dashboards minimalist. If one chart doesn’t inform a decision, remove it.
Alerts that don’t burn you out
Nothing kills monitoring faster than alert fatigue. Configure few alerts that really matter:
- Critical (wake me up):
- No heartbeat > 3 minutes.
- Broker auth failure 3x in a row.
- Order reconciliation failure (stuck orders).
- Daily loss limit reached → strategy halted.
- Warning (handle soon):
- Latency above SLO for 10 minutes.
- Data feed stale > 30 seconds.
- API rate-limit near threshold.
Use escalations: warn by email, escalate to SMS/Telegram if unresolved after 10 minutes.
Fail-over and graceful degradation
Things break. Your system should bend, not snap.
VPS fail-over: Keep a warm standby (snapshot or IaC template). If the primary goes dark, one command (or automated trigger) spins up the standby, pulls the latest .env secrets, and starts the bot.
Idempotent startup: Your bot should detect existing open positions at boot, reconcile internal state, and continue safely—no duplicate orders.
Rate-limit handling: Backoff and retry logic for bursty signals. Never hammer the broker.
Network hiccups: Queue orders locally; once connectivity returns, send in correct sequence with timestamps.
The order reconciliation pattern (don’t skip this)
For each signal, you want a clean state machine:
received → validated → submitted → acknowledged → filled/partially filled → settled
Store each transition with a timestamp. A watchdog scans for “stuck” states (e.g., submitted with no ack after 30s). If detected, it:
- Cancels & resubmits (idempotently), or
- Halts the strategy and alerts you to investigate.
This pattern is the difference between “weird ghost fills” and a system you trust.
Monitoring slippage (the silent P/L leak)
Automated doesn’t mean perfect fills. Track expected vs actual fill prices and compute slippage per venue/instrument/time-of-day. Over a month, small leaks become real money. Use this to adjust order types (limit vs marketable limit), time windows, or avoid low-liquidity periods.
Don’t micromanage. Establish rhythms.
Healthy monitoring feels like quick pulses + weekly hygiene:
Daily (1–3 minutes):
- Check dashboard for red flags.
- Skim overnight alerts (should be few).
Weekly (15 minutes):
- Review error logs, slippage report, any halts.
- Verify backups and snapshots.
- Sanity-check risk guardrails vs. recent volatility.
Monthly (30–45 minutes):
- Postmortem any incidents (what happened, fixed how, prevention).
- Update runbooks (simple “if X then Y” instructions).
- Review uptime/error budget.
This is how you sleep well while bots work.
Cost: still low, still boring
- VPS: ~$10/mo
- Healthchecks + email: free/cheap
- Grafana/Prometheus: free (self-host)
- SMS/Telegram: low cost
- Time to set up: an afternoon
Once it’s done, you glance, not gaze.
Where to go next
If you’re new to the series, catch up here:
- Part 1: https://tradingwhale.io/the-bored-trader-manifesto-part-1/
- Part 2: https://tradingwhale.io/the-bored-trader-manifesto-part-2/
- Part 3: https://tradingwhale.io/the-bored-trader-manifesto-part-3/
- Part 4: https://tradingwhale.io/the-bored-trader-manifesto-part-4/
- Part 5: https://tradingwhale.io/the-bored-trader-manifesto-part-5/
Ready to wire in execution the right way? Start with our IBKR pipeline:
IBKR Automated Trading Engine → https://tradingwhale.io/ibkr-automated-trading-engine/
#AlgoTrading #AutomatedTrading #TradingBot #SystemMonitoring #TradingBotUptime #Prometheus #Grafana #TradingAutomation #IBKR #BoringIsTheNewAlpha
