

Show HN: Get calls on mobile, skype when a website is down - metricscat_com
http://notifyninja.com

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JacobAldridge
Reminds me of what patio11 does (off the top of my head, he rolled his own
solution using Twilio). There's some more information in this post of his [1]
- look for the heading "Be Notified Of Failures In A Timely Manner".

Any solution that prevents rolling your own, including the time and possible
errors that involves, sounds great.

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/04/20/building-highly-
reliable...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/04/20/building-highly-reliable-
websites-for-small-companies/)

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patio11
_Reminds me of what patio11 does (off the top of my head, he rolled his own
solution using Twilio)._

Yep. I can't recommend this, by the way. (+) Use PagerDuty or something.

\+ You run the risk of losing the monitoring infrastructure and the rest of
your infrastructure to the same cause, thus not knowing that the system is
down.

If you implement it yourself, do a bidirectional deadman's switch, where the
website raises a yellow alert if example.net/monitoring-endpoint isn't hit in
e.g. 15 minutes and the monitoring infrastructure raises a red alert if the
monitoring endpoint doesn't respond with a green result. (Mine runs a bunch of
tests that demonstrate minimum functioning of the system _and_ verifies that
user activity within the last interval is within historical norms +/\- a fudge
factor. If anything goes wrong, it 500s that page.)

