What would make you switch from your current website uptime monitoring tool to a new tool?
Hi,
I am pretty sure that most of you are using some kind of website uptime monitoring tool. What would make you switch to a new tool we are building?
Can you let me know what are some things you like and dislike about the website uptime monitoring tool that you are using?
I am sure you are thinking that I am nuts because this is such a crowded space. How am I ever going to make money? Here are the reasons we are entering this space:
- It is a huge fragmented market. There is no clear winner.
- In terms of technology, we have something unique and we do have advantages over others in this space. More specifically, our cost of running the service will be at least 3 times less than our competitors.
- We need to use this technology for another tool. We need to build it anyway. So it makes sense to provide this as a separate SAAS solution as well.
Thank you.
For me as someone who host some product sites which does not generate to much traffic, I really care a lot more about UX/UI/EE testing than uptime monitoring. Especially when I use a hosting provider such as netlify or webflow, it really does not cross my mind.
@gervwyk Thanks for the feedback! Agreed that this tool is not really relevant if you are primarily building static sites or not hosting them yourselves.
I've used many tools of this nature in the past. This functionality is baked into a lot of production grade systems like AWS cloudwatch, datadog, new relic, sentry, pagerduty and more. These tools are fine - they provide a ton of metrics that are useful to me including uptime. In order for me to use another separate tool specifically for tracking uptime, it would need to provide a lot more functionality in terms of correlation to other metrics, so I could easily identify and resolve an issue causing the downtime. For example:
These are all things as an engineer I would love to see in the market when it comes to infrastructure management and metrics. Hope this helps!
@shogunpurple Thanks a lot for the feedback! Which services within AWS or GCP do you use that are more prone to failure?
It really comes down to your architecture and usage rather than the services themselves. If you have a high throughput service that gets hit with millions of HTTP requests, it could potentially fail. Putting a messaging queue in front of it with retries is a way to mitigate this. In my experience, things like memory usage are a pretty regular culprit when it comes to services failing.
I am not currently using any website monitoring tool but here are some features I would consider handy from a developer point of view:
Some way to test the UI or UX, write tests that run periodically (Similar to what Selenium offers)
Integration with existing analytics providers or a custom one that tracks all the basics: pageviews, conversions, custom events, etc..
If you want to go crazy, I really like what Fullstory offers (heatmaps, screen recordings of users interacting with your website)
Hope this helps!
@hollywood Thanks for the feedback. To tell you frankly, I messed up in the question. :) What I meant is the website uptime monitoring tool. Basically it pings your site every few seconds/minutes and lets you know via email/SMS/voice whenever your site goes down.
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@Felixcheruiyot Monitoring app + third party services is a good idea. But as you mentioned, doing it in a way that's secure is tricky. I had a look at your artemis-cli code and it seems that you are putting authentication information in the config file. This will work if you are developing this for yourself but will not work if this is a third-party monitoring application.
The other option is I integrate with my own credentials with all the common third party APIs. My assumption is that if an API is down for me, it'll be down for all the people. Not sure how true this assumption is though.
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Got it. I think you are talking about a Heartbeat monitoring tool, which definitely falls under Monitoring tools. Thanks for the feedback!