After  a year of development, open testing, refinement and a global pandemic. We're ready.

Pingsphere.io is a comprehensive online monitoring solution to provide detailed availability detection. There are many online monitoring systems around and most people have asked why should they move or start using Pingsphere.io over others in the market. Well we're determined to be the best at what we do and we care about what we build.

First I'd like to share our origin and why we decided to create Pingsphere in the first place. Over a year ago we were sat eating KFC while talking about online monitoring and how recently that monitoring had missed a production issue. No notifications, alerts or indication that the system was not behaving as expected and impacting our customers. After some thoughts and some googling we found how the monitoring worked under the hood. The system didn't check how we thought it did, it wasn't regularly or from several locations. It just checked from one scheduled location at a time once a minute. Which we could do easily with a one-line Curl and some tiny VM's.

It got us thinking could we do this better... why were we using that service and other services around were not so much better unless you wanted to pay enterprise rates for it. We decided to create our own.

Pingsphere.io is a proper monitoring system. Which throughly checks for the availability of a connected service, it's configurable and detailed (think Postman) while being a full SaaS offering that won't cost you enterprise rates.

What makes Pingsphere standout?

Free Services. Nobody likes up-fronting cash to trial a service, and 14 days might not be enough to see any real impact that you might rely on a service such as Pingsphere for. It might even be that getting a card for work from a boss is a real challenge (we've been there too!). That's why, having some free services for you to play and understand the tool is something hugely important to us and we hope valuable to you.

Alert Integrations. We all know the feeling when dealing with monitoring requests. "I want an email that goes to slack which pages me out of hours but on the weekend it should hit up this zapier integration or leave an automated VoIP message" This is unfortunately not as much of an exaggeration as we'd like, and whilst we definitely don't have everybody's notification preferences dialed-in, we've built pingsphere in such a way that with enough requests from you over on our github issues we can bolt it in without too much trouble.

Slow checks and poor configuration. The fact that for a lot of similar uptime platforms 60 seconds can pass before you hear a peep is just downright archaic. Especially when that's the fastest you can get, and not the best choice for a less critical service. We've decided on a 5s interval for checks, with a custom number of misses before you get alerts. In essence, it's a choice of "how many 5 second intervals can I miss before this is a real issue". It's KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) at its finest!

We're not just GET requests. We don't just send standard HTTP GET request by default, we allow you to decide. Sometimes all you need is a quick check to ensure your website loads and that enough but what if you want to check more than that? A good example would be say you run an online store and want to make sure someone can login. You can send a full request with headers, form body and URL parameters to validate. What about an API? We support the major API authentication methods just for this use case.

We have a usable modern design. Something we've tried hard to get right is how we display information. Ensuring that what you need is right in front of you or easy to find. Best way to find out is to go check it out for yourself. We're always open to feedback, features and improvements.

Where do we go from here?

We're committed to making Pingsphere the best monitoring solution on the market. From here we will be carefully expanding the uses of Pingsphere to further help operational teams with day to day troubles of monitoring and dive into the complicated world of analytics to provide you with insight and metrics on what you're checking. Looking further into the future we can see Pingsphere broadening out further into operational services of security, user management and system reporting but we'll talk about that for when we get there.

Stay tuned!

Whilst we are burrowing away to make sure we deliver an awesome product experience, check back here or subscribe below to stay in the loop.