Why Stashboard and Pingdom Weren't Enough: The Evolution of a Status Page

http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page

by zende • 14 years ago

65 19 14 years ago

blog.balancedpayments.com

mahmoudimus3• 14 years ago

This was in response to the feedback we've received and requests to open source the project. The original post was here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812222

Happy to field any questions :)

gacba• 14 years ago

Great post--I can use this exact setup with my AWS server and was about to start writing something similar. Thanks for saving me loads of time.

mahmoudimus3• 14 years ago

Absolutely! Feel free to shoot an email (in my profile) if you need help setting it up.

We're also on irc.freenode.net #balanced

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Have you looked at anything else but Pingdom?

It has nice visuals and free trials, but it's a relative newcomer to the market of the monitoring services and they also have a tendency to keep things simpler than they need to be. Something more mature and enterprisey, like RedAlert, would fit the bill.

mjallday2• 14 years ago

We looked at a few other solutions like ServerDensity etc.

The main issue was that we wanted to report across all requests, e.g. there is no single health check endpoint that an external system can hit to determine if everything is OK or not.

The crux of the matter is that we needed to parse our Nginx logs for the response code on every single request and calculate the uptime from that.

amatix• 14 years ago

Over 6 years (July 2006 according to archive.org) is a 'relative newcomer'? You're hard to please :)

Their API took a long time to arrive, but we've used it for disabling checks during maintenance events pretty effectively.

As mentioned in the article, POST/PUT requests are on the list of Things I Want though. Would be good to be able to group a bunch of checks together into a service too.

ajsharp• 14 years ago

Awesome write-up. Really love the technical depth in this post. Slurp looks great too, gonna play around with it.

LiveTheDream• 14 years ago

Here's a gotcha related to Pingdom -- if your account isn't set up properly, you can run out of SMS credits which means you may not get that critical SMS alert!

pekk• 14 years ago

If only someone would invent a hosted service which sets up your Pingdom account properly for reliable delivery...

pulledpork• 14 years ago

Do they at least ping you to let you know you're out of funds? In an ideal world I'd hope they'd extend you some credit.

munger• 14 years ago

It's easy to setup correctly. It lets you set a rule like "buy me X credits when I get below Y credits"

I think ours is something like buy me 20 credits when we get below 5.

Also you can install their iphone app and use push notifications for free instead of or in addition to SMS.

jareau2• 14 years ago

Here's a link to the actual status page: https://status.balancedpayments.com/

mwetzler• 14 years ago

I love this!! Scanned the article several times looking for this link. Nice design work! Love the twitter integration.

jareau2• 14 years ago

Thanks! Take the source. Use it at home. Tell your friends.

conroy• 14 years ago

Author of Stashboard here, love what you guys have done. I'd love to integrate your frontpage design as an optional template.

When I wrote Stashboard, monitoring was explicitly not a requirement. Since it has an API, the idea what to write your own tools for monitoring that would update Stashboard in the event of an outage.

Pingdom support is something that's been asked for many times, so it might be time to dedicate some time to adding integration.

mahmoudimus3• 14 years ago

conroy, thanks for your comment!

Can we open an issue on https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api so we can track this?

We'd be happy to help with the code contribution as well.

Why Stashboard and Pingdom Weren't Enough: The Evolution of a Status Page

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