Do I need delivery monitoring for push notifications?

Usually, yes—if push notifications matter to your product, you should have some form of delivery monitoring.

Why it’s useful

Push notifications can fail or degrade for reasons outside your app, such as:

• expired or invalid device tokens
• APNs/FCM outages or throttling
• misconfigured certificates/keys
• user device settings, OS restrictions, or network issues
• app-side bugs in payload formatting

Without monitoring, you may only discover problems when users complain.

What “monitoring” should include

At minimum, track:

• send success/failure rates
• provider responses from APNs/FCM
• invalid token rate
• delivery latency
• opt-out/uninstall trends if available
• per-campaign and per-segment performance

Important nuance

“Delivered” doesn’t always mean “seen.”
Push providers can often confirm that a message was accepted for delivery, but actual receipt on the device and especially user engagement are harder to guarantee. So it’s best to monitor:

1. Accepted by provider
2. Delivered to device if supported
3. Opened / clicked / acted on

When you might not need much

If push is a very minor feature, or you only send occasional low-stakes alerts, a basic error log may be enough. But even then, at least monitor:

• failed sends
• invalid tokens
• provider errors

Recommendation

If push notifications are important, implement basic delivery monitoring from day one. It’s relatively low-cost and helps you catch issues early.

If you want, I can also suggest a minimal monitoring setup for APNs/FCM or a dashboard metric list.