Payment Gateway Monitoring
What PRO records for each gateway, the failure-rate and response-time thresholds, and what it cannot see.
What it records
PRO listens to two WooCommerce events, as they happen:
- A success when WooCommerce reports that an order’s payment is complete.
- A failure when an order’s status changes to Failed.
For each one it saves the gateway, and the time from order creation to that event. It then judges every gateway separately on PRO’s 5-minute cycle.
The defaults
PRO looks at the last 60 minutes, separately for each gateway. These values are fixed in this version and can’t be changed in settings.
| Failure rate (failed ÷ all attempts) | Result |
|---|---|
| Under 10% | Healthy (normal card declines) |
| 10% to under 20% | Low |
| 20% to under 25% | Medium |
| 25% or more | Critical |
- Few attempts. With fewer than 3 attempts in the window a percentage isn’t meaningful, so any failure is reported as an isolated Low issue.
- Slow checkout. An average response time of 8 seconds or more raises a Medium issue on its own. If failures and slowness both apply, the higher severity wins.
- Resolving. When the rate falls below the thresholds, or a gateway has no activity in the window, its issue resolves automatically.
- Email. This monitor raises Low, Medium or Critical (never High). Which of those email you depends on the Issue Emails setting. By default only Critical does.
Example. In the last hour a gateway has 20 attempts and 5 are marked Failed. That is 25%, so a Critical issue is raised and an email is sent.
The Payments screen
Open Commerce Health → Payments to see each gateway’s average response, failure rate and status: Healthy, Needs a look (Low), Degraded (Medium) or Critical. Only gateways with activity in the last 60 minutes are listed. Filter chips let you jump straight to the ones that need attention.
What it can and cannot detect
| PRO detects | PRO does not detect |
|---|---|
| A run of orders that a gateway marks as Failed, for example declines or a gateway error. | A payment that starts and never finishes. The order stays Pending, so no event is recorded. See Stuck Payments Monitoring. |
| Checkouts that complete, but take unusually long. | A gateway that leaves the order Pending after a decline instead of marking it Failed. |
| A gateway that fails on one order in four, even if the rest of the store looks fine. | Orders with no payment method (for example a $0 order), and payments made outside WooCommerce. |
| Whether the gateway can reach your webhook, and a checkout that never creates an order. |
Bank transfer, cheque and cash on delivery don’t normally report a completed payment, so they are not counted as completed checkouts.
Still need help?
Search the docs first — or open a ticket and our team will pick it up from the Support screen.