Laurent’s blog

Sleep well, someone is monitoring your servers

To most of us this will sound obvious, but I’ve been running into quite a few startups that were neglecting this essential aspect of their infrastructure.

If your worst nightmare is getting an email or a call from one of your friendly user saying “I haven’t been able to login for the last 45 minutes, did anyone notice?”. Or if you start suffering from insomnia or waking-up in the middle of the night wondering if the servers are down, you should really read this.

As professionals we know our service never goes down, right? Not quite. The reality is, the only thing we know for sure is, the systems will fail at some point. There is a number of prevention measures that can be put in place to postpone probable issues as much as possible, but eventually, something will fail. In case it happens, you better be the first one to know.

Setting up monitoring is the simplest solution to be notified in real-time. We (or someone from the team) is always reachable whether it be by email, SMS or IM. The goal: hunt you down to let you know what is happening.

As everything today, don’t try to build it from scratch or from open source, there is someone out there that is doing a hell of a job to make sure it works well. And do you really want your monitoring service to be running on the same network segment as everything else? Should you be using your current infrastructure that is the one supposed to be monitored? Do you have colocation in two-dozen locations across the globe?

There is quite a number of providers that have very complete solutions for very cheap. Pingdom is one of them, its a Swedish company that I particularly like for their simple and straightforward way to answer my needs. Prices start very low, the base package is only 10$/month. You start off with 5 monitors and it allows for SMS notifications, a real must. This is well enough to start getting some real metrics on the services’ uptime.

Downtime has just too much impact on your image, your users, your sleep…  So, there is absolutely no reason why you are not already using such a service. Even for a small garage-based startup or your blog. And there is enough monitoring services out there for you to choose someone that fits your specific needs.