
Why Stashboard and Pingdom Weren't Enough: The Evolution of a Status Page - zende
http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page
======
conroy
Author of Stashboard here, love what you guys have done. I'd love to integrate
your frontpage design as an optional template.

When I wrote Stashboard, monitoring was explicitly not a requirement. Since it
has an API, the idea what to write your own tools for monitoring that would
update Stashboard in the event of an outage.

Pingdom support is something that's been asked for many times, so it might be
time to dedicate some time to adding integration.

~~~
mahmoudimus
conroy, thanks for your comment!

Can we open an issue on <https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api> so we can
track this?

We'd be happy to help with the code contribution as well.

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mahmoudimus
This was in response to the feedback we've received and requests to open
source the project. The original post was here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812222>

Happy to field any questions :)

~~~
huhtenberg
Have you looked at anything else but Pingdom?

It has nice visuals and free trials, but it's a relative newcomer to the
market of the monitoring services and they also have a tendency to keep things
simpler than they need to be. Something more mature and enterprisey, like
RedAlert, would fit the bill.

~~~
amatix
Over 6 years (July 2006 according to archive.org) is a 'relative newcomer'?
You're hard to please :)

Their API took a long time to arrive, but we've used it for disabling checks
during maintenance events pretty effectively.

As mentioned in the article, POST/PUT requests are on the list of Things I
Want though. Would be good to be able to group a bunch of checks together into
a service too.

~~~
huhtenberg
Pingdom really started to develop into its current form around 2009 I think.
Before that it might've existed, but I don't think it was aggressively
marketed and developed.

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LiveTheDream
Here's a gotcha related to Pingdom -- if your account isn't set up properly,
you can run out of SMS credits which means you may not get that critical SMS
alert!

~~~
pulledpork
Do they at least ping you to let you know you're out of funds? In an ideal
world I'd hope they'd extend you some credit.

~~~
munger
It's easy to setup correctly. It lets you set a rule like "buy me X credits
when I get below Y credits"

I think ours is something like buy me 20 credits when we get below 5.

Also you can install their iphone app and use push notifications for free
instead of or in addition to SMS.

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jareau
Here's a link to the actual status page:
<https://status.balancedpayments.com/>

~~~
mwetzler
I love this!! Scanned the article several times looking for this link. Nice
design work! Love the twitter integration.

~~~
jareau
Thanks! Take the source. Use it at home. Tell your friends.

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ajsharp
Awesome write-up. Really love the technical depth in this post. Slurp looks
great too, gonna play around with it.

