You may have come here from a link, or a google search relating to 'uptime checks'. This might be because you want an external place to do some mission critical checks on your services outside of your environment. It might be that you currently do no monitoring but figured it would be a good idea. Either way, welcome! Below you'll find a little about who we are, why we are doing this and the like.
Why are we doing this?
If you are thinking something such as: "but there are already a dozen services that do this" then know that we thought the same thing also when initially discussing. We then realized a few things that we could do better, grabbed a coffee and got started. Some of those things we try to do better than anyone else are below:
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 unfortuanately not as much of an exaggeration as we'd like, and whilst we definately don't have everybodys 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 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!
Wait a second, you're only doing ICMP checks?
Yes, for now! We're making sure we build a robust and performance set of services so that your uptime checks are reliable, and scalable to a huge number of addresses. We're already discussing and looking at additional checks:
- TCP
- UDP
- DNS
- IPv6
- HTTP2 / gRPC
- API
- Traceroute
Though it's woth noting, the above checks are definately not inclusive! Keep giving us feedback at our github and what the community decides will definately play a part in what to build next!
Stay tuned!
Whilst we're burrowing away to make sure we deliver an awesome uptime experience, check back here or subscribe below to stay in the loop.
