

Solarwinds acquires Pingdom - themichael
http://solarwinds-marketing.s3.amazonaws.com/solarwinds/PDFs/SWI-HIEMDALLR-External-FAQ.pdf

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stephen
To celebrate, they just sent this marketing email to all of our "serviceX-
alert@" addresses:

    
    
        Subject: We are joining the SolarWinds family
        Body: Pingdom is moving forward quickly. We can’t wait to show you all the ideas we have for taking monitoring to the next level.
    

But, wait, our "serviceX-alert@" emails are all hooked up to PagerDuty so that
any -alert email == SMS/call the engineer on duty.

So, right, basically all of our PagerDuty alerts are going off right now, due
to a damn marketing email.

They've done this crap of sending marketing emails to _alert_ addresses
instead of just _user_ addresses before (I know they are separate in the
system; our serviceX-alert emails are not on the "Users" page), but we figured
it was a one-time fluke and surely they would realize their mistake.

Guess not.

This just builds on my already huge frustration with their UI--other than just
being generally confusing, if you have failed pings, you don't get the HTTP
logs ("Root Cause analysis") for all of them, you only get the HTTP logs for
the magical 1st one from when the incident triggered.

Oh, and if you make a duplicate alarm, for the sole purpose of seeing the
latest HTTP logs from your server, surprise, the 1st failed log won't have
them--you first have to make your new alert pass, and then fail, and then now
you'll be granted access to the magical Root Cause analysis logs.

Suggestions for competitors?

~~~
drsim
Well, your comment about the 'root cause analysis' suggests you need something
more substantial than this, but I've been very pleasantly surprised with
www.uptimerobot.com.

I have both Pingdom and Uptime Robot doing basic monitoring of a single web
endpoint and Uptime Robot consistently alerts me to downtime by email faster
than Pingdom.

Because Uptime Robot is free and doesn't have (lacks?) a business model I
didn't take them that seriously. Their performance suggests otherwise.

~~~
stephen
Well, my comment is dead, but thanks for the Uptime Robot mention.

We'd seen them too last week when Googling for competitors but were, right,
scared off by their "seems fly-by-night" free-ness.

