Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/posts/using-twitter-to-send-alerts-when-your-site-goes-down

by anson • 17 years ago

22 31 17 years ago

etherpad.com

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

I send emails.

a) Way more reliable.

b) Also land on my phone [with vibration/sound alert]

c) I can put a lot more details in them since there is no 140 chars limit

d) Much easier to do: one line of code - old and simple tech from the 80s (sendmail) beats ugly kids of tomorrow (Twitter) any day of the week!

Mr. Schmidt was right. :-P

aaroniba• 17 years ago

We send emails too, but it's also nice to get a TXT on your phone for really urgent information such as a problem with the server.

sjs3824• 17 years ago

I think his point was that twitter-to-sms isn't always as prompt as you want it to be.

jawngee3• 17 years ago

Why not just email to yournumber@yourcarrier.net and get it as an sms too?

mjtokelly• 17 years ago

Leaving the Twitter feed public could actually be a nice way to make site status and maintenance transparent with your users.

siculars2• 17 years ago

imho, twitter (and others like it) will morph into a public messaging protocol. as more and more people use it the signal will get drowned by the noise. eventually the only worthwhile way of using twitter will be via enhanced filtering rules for meaningful information from people you know and follow.

twitter is really like a public pastebin with great api support which will allow you to command and control computers remotely. soon the posted messages will be encrypted nuggets taking the Public out of public.

sjs3824• 17 years ago

If the signal gets drowned out by the noise, that's your fault as a user. You either follow too many people or follow the wrong people. Twitter essentially acts as a whitelist-based messaging platform.

Note the word "whitelist"

siculars2• 17 years ago

as programmers, we always know it is "the users fault." but as users, we expect a service to have value and "just work." i do specifically mention getting meaningful information from following users you know.

but how do you find those users? enhanced filtering keyed on multiple vectors will become the only useful mechanism for consuming information from not only those you dont follow but also from those you do.

as it stands i tweet on both professional and personal topics. and so do those that i follow. now if i know these people personally than i may be interested in their personal tweets. but if i do not, than i dont want non-relevant tweets cloggin up my feed.

enhanced clients with better, granular consumption controls are the only way forward.

transburgh• 17 years ago

With the amount of time Twitter is down would make this an interesting test.

jmtulloss2• 17 years ago

How much are they down these days? I thought they had gotten past the massive reliability issues they used to have.

jsdalton2• 17 years ago

They've been on and off for me all day today.

arasakik• 17 years ago

We do this with Chatterous.com, and it works perfectly. We set up a group, added our monitoring email as a member and have it email the group when something goes wrong. We get alerts on our phone, IM, or email. The best part is that one of us also can respond (via phone or IM) to let the others know someone is taking action on the alert.

baddox• 17 years ago

My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.

kubrick4• 17 years ago

Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

Actually it is very simple: adding Twitter to the mix adds one more "moving part". Shooting a simple email and then multiplexing it (via aliasing, for instance) to X recipients is easier and more reliable. Create an address like my-startup-site-is-down@gmail.com and forward to X other destinations from there (including Twitter if you want), and send your notifications to that address using standard 20+ year old protocols and tools, instead of some 3rd party proprietary stuff which was "released often, released early" and hasn't crashed "in months"

apgwoz• 17 years ago

I've seen the fail whale 2 times today. Refreshing worked, but the problems there aren't entirely solved.

mr_justin• 17 years ago

Serious downtime and downtime are not the same, and if twitter is down for a few minutes that means a few minutes of not receiving an SMS because you're routing your services through them.

kubrick4• 17 years ago

You could probably pair this advice with http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.

aschobel2• 17 years ago

What do you do when Twitter is down?

Why not use pingdom for monitoring like Twitter does.

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?...

We use pingdom at 3b and love it.

makanikai• 17 years ago

gah, what is with the 800's ms average response time?

is it safe to say that's pingdom's connection?

aschobel2• 17 years ago

They have monitoring locations around the world, but I've been getting unusually high pings from their Berkeley location.

gengstrand• 17 years ago

We do this for both http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity (http://twitter.com/cogenuity) and http://www.code-roller.com (http://twitter.com/code_roller)

Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

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