🥏 Growing Pains: Our First Incident Report (And Why It's Making DiscGolf.Buzz Better)

Date: June 28, 2026
Duration: Approximately 15–20 minutes
Status: ✅ Resolved

At DiscGolf.Buzz, our goal has always been to build the most complete and useful resource for the disc golf community. That means we're constantly adding new videos, expanding course information, cataloging discs, and building new tools behind the scenes. Sometimes that growth uncovers opportunities to improve our infrastructure.

Earlier today, the site experienced a brief outage lasting approximately 15–20 minutes. We believe in being transparent about events like this, so we're introducing what will become a regular part of our development process: public incident reports.

What Happened?

While performing one of the largest content imports in the site's history—bringing more than 1,600 new videos into the library—the server was simultaneously handling AI-assisted content processing and normal visitor traffic. The combined workload temporarily exhausted available application resources, causing the website to become unresponsive.

The issue was identified quickly, service was restored within seconds, and no user data was lost. Our database remained healthy throughout the event.

Current Scale

Incidents like this are often a byproduct of growth. At the time of the outage, DiscGolf.Buzz was serving:

• 🎥 19,973 videos
• 🎥 2,543 podcast
• 🥏 2,348 discs
• 📍 4,342 courses

That's a lot of content—and we're only getting started.

What We're Changing

Real-time Service Monitoring — We deployed Uptime Kuma on a dedicated Linode server completely separate from the main application. This means if discgolf.buzz goes down, the monitor stays up and keeps tracking. It checks all five services every 2 minutes: the main website, the API, the WebSocket chat server, the Discourse community, and MyDiscGolfBuzz.

Public Status Page — Available at discgolf.buzz/status, the page shows real-time operational status for every service, live response time graphs, per-service heartbeat history, and automatically surfaces any active incidents. It respects your system's light/dark preference and refreshes automatically every 2 minutes.

Visitor Analytics — We integrated a self-hosted, privacy-first analytics system directly into the Headless CMS backend. No third-party trackers, no data leaving our servers. It tracks page views, unique visitors, session data, traffic sources, device types, and geographic data — all visible in a custom dashboard inside our control center.

Uptime Dashboard — Five monitors covering every public-facing service, each with response time history, 24-hour uptime percentage, and instant alerting if anything goes down.

All of this is self-hosted infrastructure we own and control — no subscriptions, no third-party data sharing, no vendor lock-in.

Moving API Monitoring to the Top of the Roadmap

One unexpected benefit of today's incident is that it clarified what should come next.

An advanced API monitoring and observability platform has now been moved to the top of our development roadmap. The goal is simple: detect unusual patterns before they affect the community.

The new monitoring system will provide better visibility into background jobs, API activity, processing queues, and overall application health, allowing us to respond faster—and ideally prevent similar incidents altogether.

Sometimes the best features aren't the ones users see. They're the ones that quietly keep everything running.

Looking Ahead

Building DiscGolf.Buzz has always been about creating something the disc golf community can rely on. As the platform continues to grow, we'll undoubtedly encounter new challenges, but we'll also continue improving, learning, and sharing those lessons along the way.

Thank you for your patience during today's interruption and for supporting DiscGolf.Buzz as it continues to evolve.

See you on the course—and back online.