The worst class of infrastructure problem is the one you only find out about after it has already broken something. A TLS certificate on a custom domain silently reaches its renewal window and then lapses, or you cross a plan limit mid-deploy and requests start getting rejected. On Ngris, two things close that gap: the platform renews custom-domain TLS certificates automatically, and you can arm metric alerts — including proactive certificate expiry alerts and usage-threshold alerts — that fire in your dashboard before a failure does, not after. You describe the threshold you care about in plain English and Iris drafts the alert rule for you to review and enable.
The class of problem you only notice too late
There is a whole category of operational failure that never announces itself. It accumulates quietly and then presents as a page at an inconvenient hour. A cert lapses. You blow past a plan limit mid-deploy and requests start getting rejected. None of these are hard to fix once you know about them — the difficulty is entirely in the noticing. You are not sitting there watching cert expiry dates or your usage counter — you are shipping features. The answer is to set the alert once, up front, so the signal reaches you while there is still time to act on it cheaply.
Certificate expiry
When you run a custom domain, the cert behind it is issued and renewed automatically by the platform's ACME worker — the common case never needs your attention at all. You bring your own domain the usual way:
# serve a local app on your own hostname
ngris http 3000 --url app.ngris.comFor the cases where you still want an explicit heads-up — a domain whose DNS you manage elsewhere, say — ask Iris to draft a certificate-expiry alert and it produces a metric-alert rule that notifies you ahead of the renewal window. You review the threshold and enable it; from there the platform does the watching, and the alert lands with enough lead time that renewing (if it's ever needed) is a calm task rather than a scramble.
Usage burn
Plan limits are fine right up until you hit one without warning, at which point they feel like a wall that appeared out of nowhere. The free plan gives you 5 endpoints and no credit card, and the paid tiers raise the ceilings — but either way, the useful moment to hear about your consumption is before you reach the top of it, not when traffic starts getting turned away.
Say the threshold in plain English — "warn me when I hit 80% of my data cap" — and Iris drafts a usage-threshold alert for you to enable. That turns a surprise into a decision you get to make on your own schedule: trim what you are running, or move up a tier deliberately. Getting started is the same one command whether you are near a limit or nowhere close to it:
# install and expose a local service
brew install ngris
ngris http 3000An alert, not an auto-fix
A metric alert is a notification, and that word is doing real work. It surfaces the problem; you decide what to do about it. Iris does not bump your plan, and it does not reconfigure your gateway on its own to "fix" a breach. When it does help you write a fix — a WAF rule, a rate-limit rule, an SSO gate — that generation is behind a confirmation card: it drafts a new rule for you to review, never silently mutates an existing one, and nothing ships until you approve it.
That boundary is deliberate. Proactive alerting is valuable precisely because it hands you information at the right moment; it stops being trustworthy the instant it starts taking actions you did not review. So the alert stays on the surfacing side of the line. You keep the judgment, and you keep the save button.
To set one up, spin up an endpoint on the free plan — 5 endpoints, no card — then ask Iris to draft the cert-expiry or usage alert you want and enable it. Read more about what it can do on the Iris hub, or see generating metric alerts with AI.