What Should You Monitor Hour by Hour During Cyber Week?
During Cyber Week, monitor the money path hour by hour: add to cart, checkout, every payment method, promo codes, and page speed, on mobile and desktop. Run a test order before each promotion starts, check again every hour at peak, and name one owner who can escalate immediately.
Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30 this year. Most of the damage in a peak week comes from problems that go unnoticed for hours. This runbook turns monitoring into a schedule your team can follow.
- Test the whole money path before every promotion: cart, checkout, each payment method, discount codes.
- At peak, check on a fixed rhythm instead of waiting for complaints. Name an owner for each check.
- Look at mobile separately. A desktop pass does not prove mobile works.
- Agree on the escalation path and the rollback before the first send, not during the incident.
What should you check before the doors open?
Place a real test order with every payment method you offer, on a phone and on a desktop, including a discount code and a guest checkout. Confirm that promotion banners, countdown timers and inventory messages match what the offer says. Agree on the code freeze, the owner of each check and how to reach them. If you have not set the freeze yet, this guide on the pre-Black Friday code freeze covers it, and the Black Friday monitoring playbook has the wider plan.
How should the schedule work at peak?
Waiting for a customer to complain is the slowest detection method there is. Use a fixed rhythm instead.
What do you look at each hour?
Keep the list short enough to finish in minutes. Can a shopper add to cart? Does checkout load and complete with each payment method? Do discount codes apply? Did page speed on key templates move? Are there new front-end errors, and at which funnel stage do they sit? Ranking new errors by the step they block, rather than by count alone, tells you which one to look at first.
Why check mobile separately?
Mobile shoppers use different layouts, keyboards, wallets and connections. A flow that works in a desktop test can fail on a phone. Monitoring mobile ecommerce explains what to watch, and why cutting site monitoring before peak is risky covers the cost of going dark.
Who does what when something breaks?
Decide the order in advance: who confirms the problem, who has authority to roll back a change, and who tells the customer-facing team. During peak, even a small checkout problem is costly, so time to decision matters more than a perfect diagnosis.
Noibu’s Bug Resolution agent and Performance agent find what is broken or slow and build a change for your team to approve, so engineers spend peak hours reviewing instead of searching. To see where your store stands today, start with the free website audit.
Frequently asked questions
When are Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2026?
How often should we run checks during peak?
What should a test order cover?
Should mobile be monitored separately?
Who should own escalation?
The short version
Peak weeks reward teams that check on a schedule and agree the escalation path early. Print the rhythm, name the owners and keep the checks short. Noibu is AI for ecommerce operations, the always-on optimization system that keeps online stores running at their best. A team of supervised AI agents finds what's broken, slow, or leaking revenue, does the work, and hands results back for human approval. Trusted by retailers like Free People, Guess, Liquid I.V., and Ariat.
