

What creative things can you do with monitoring services? - dcaylor

What creative things have people done or can think of doing with a monitoring service, in addition to monitoring their main sites and servers?<p>Here were my eight initial thoughts, but I'm very curious what other people come up with.  http://blog.nodeping.com/2011/09/08/eight-things-you-could-do-with-checks-on-1000-targets/
======
huhtenberg
It reads like a plain promo piece (which it is) and it is not terribly
exciting. There is nothing _creative_ about what you listed. With 1000
randomized targets you could at least try and build a weathermap of the
Internet, or something along these lines. And even that wouldn't be that
creative... because there is a patent for that.

(edit) Looked at your site, FAQ included, and you have a major
misunderstanding what the most important feature of a monitoring service is.
From your customer's perspective. It is not pricing, it is not
contractlessness and it is not 1000 targets. It is your _reliability_. How
many monitoring locations you have? How well distributed they are
geographically? How would handle the case of one segment of the Internet
getting detached from another? Etc, etc. To pull a URL (or a 1000) from some
location on the Internet and match the response against a regexp - there is
absolutely nothing to it, anyone can do it and that's why there is a metric
ton of trivial monitoring services. Do tell how you are different, and not in
miniscule details.

~~~
dcaylor
Thanks for taking the time to give that input. It's a valid point about how
well we're communicating on the site. My blog post completely aside, I am
still genuinely interested in the question I asked in the HN post.

