
Pingdom is joining SolarWinds - wlj
http://royal.pingdom.com/2014/06/18/pingdom-joining-solarwinds/
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adventured
I find the phrasing on Pingdom's site to be fascinating.

On SolarWinds' site, it's an acquisition, plain as can be.

On Pingdom's site, they're pretending they're 'joining forces.'

Pingdom just got bought by a public company. It sounds like they're in for a
reality check.

~~~
jonas21
Link to SolarWinds' statement:

[http://www.solarwinds.com/company/newsroom/press_releases/ye...](http://www.solarwinds.com/company/newsroom/press_releases/years/2014/solarwinds-
acquires-pingdom.aspx)

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MattBearman
I thought it was odd that this statement seems to avoid using words like
'acquire', 'buy' or anything else the would mean Pingom has been purchased by
SolarWinds. It wasn't until I clicked on the FAQ link that I was sure that an
acquisition has just happened :s

~~~
jmeickle
The Solarwinds brand isn't as flashy as the Pingdom brand. It makes sense that
they'd want to maintain as much independence as possible until they decide
whether to eat it or not.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Exactly this.

When I think Solarwinds, I think crufty enterprise shop that needs polished
monitoring tools. When I think Pingdom, I think external monitoring for my
startup app.

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incision
Maybe now they'll find the time, money, give-a-shit or whatever to address
this maddening omission [1] (Can't omit check sources by geography).

If nothing else, this move will give me a recognizable name to refer to when
trying to convince certain folks to dump some of the truly awful monitoring
services out there. Not long ago I encountered a place that was paying one of
the old giants $1100/yr _per target_ for simple pings and email only alerts.

1: [http://pingdom.uservoice.com/forums/113203-my-
pingdom/sugges...](http://pingdom.uservoice.com/forums/113203-my-
pingdom/suggestions/2223355-ability-to-choose-which-probe-servers-to-use)

~~~
edwhitesell
I've never used Pingdom (or any service like it), but I've considered building
a monitoring service for a number of years. The ability to configure
monitoring and/or alerting by geographic region (if not specific nodes) has
always been in the top 5 list of features.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Now may be your time to build your service.

~~~
windexh8er
Agreed, but wait until I build mine first. ;)

Pingdom seemed to be the service that was one of the more prominent first to
market options and then promptly sat on their laurels waiting for a buy-out.
That seems to have come to fruition.

Based on the quality of product Solarwinds offers, I will now go delete any
remaining monitoring I've been using from them.

I think the market could use a really good monitoring platform that does a lot
more than what's on the service offering from the likes of Pingdom.

~~~
freakezoid
Take a look at PRTG from Paessler ;)

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verelo
I really feel that in a world with tools like Newrelic that pingdom is
starting to lose its value. I know there are significant differences between
the two, but in terms of what I personally rely on each day to keep a tab on
things, I can say that for me Pingdom is far less critical than it once was.

I hope this deal sees them innovate beyond a UI refresh (Which is just about
all thats changed in the last 10 years)

~~~
ceejayoz
The UI refresh was a bit of a disaster. Pingdom didn't need significant
changes because it worked well at what it did. I just wanted to know when my
servers went down and when they came back up.

Now with their UI change I can't even change the SMS provider to use, which
means one of our devops staff doesn't get the SMSes he's supposed to. He also
gets changed from the US country code to Afghanistan's. I've got a trouble
ticket open with them that keeps getting auto-closed after 120 hours of
"inactivity" because they said "yep, that looks like a bug, we'll let you know
when fixed".

~~~
kenrose
Instead of using Pingdom's SMS, you could always hook up another system that
more reliably delivers alerts (e.g., PagerDuty).

Full disclosure: I work for PagerDuty.

~~~
ceejayoz
Believe me, we're currently evaluating you guys and other solutions,
especially if Pingdom's being acquired.

~~~
mathrawka
Check out OpsGenie, it works well and they are more friendly for
bootstrappers.

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karlkatzke
Called it last week when SolarWinds started posting lots of Linux Admin jobs.

~~~
dkhenry
So a windows shop acquires a Linux based cloud service and thinks it will be
able to hire its way to Linux competency. Good Luck with that

~~~
clavalle
In Austin, that probably won't be too difficult. Expensive, but not difficult.

~~~
mrjatx
Shouldn't be expensive. Plenty of "1st admin job" webhosts in town. Although I
don't know why anyone would leave them for a job at Solarwinds.

~~~
clavalle
SolarWinds is a good place to work AFAIK.

All of the employees that I know are cool people and very happy there and the
pay, if I remember correctly, was pretty good.

BTW, the good admins are not coming out of the standard webhost support roles.
Those people are cheap, but for good reason. The higher tiers at those shops,
maybe.

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site24x7
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ultimoo
Pingdom is a good product and I've used it with moderate success.

However, sometimes I can't help but chuckle at the marketing and
productization genius of someone who monetized the classic `ping`! Anyway,
congratulations to the pingdom team on the acquisition and hope to see a more
comprehensive API from them soon.

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pyrox420
Don't mess this up SolarWinds....

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carinanardi
as a nice alternative there is also Monitis, all-in-one monitoring platform,
so it is quite suitable for any operational needs. by the way, they have
recently integrated with pagerduty and zapier. www.monitis.com

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freeasinfree
Ugh, Solarwinds. The most inflexible, Windows-only software I've ever used.
Goodbye Pingdom.

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deancognation
pingdom works great, we've been using them for the LiveFanChat.com sites for
the past 2 years and never had a problem

