3 ms·

Is it so hard? At my company, I set up a status page linked to a pinging service which automatically pings various endpoints every 5 minutes (as well as our 3rd

Is it so hard? At my company, I set up a status page linked to a pinging service which automatically pings various endpoints every 5 minutes (as well as our 3rd-party dependencies) and automatically flags any problems if a ping does not respond. The pinging service and status page, at our scale, is free and our status page is actually useful and automated for 90% of our stuff.

cortesoft 4y ago
That works for a website, but doesn’t work for all outage types with a service like zoom. If the website/api is responding, but you can’t create new calls, for example, the outage wouldn’t be detected.
- phaer 4y ago
  I think the problem might be less on the technical and more on the business-side of things. Status pages that raise customers confidence in your service are good from a marketing perspective. Automatically publishing uptime data without human review might be bad from a marketing perspective, if you don't trust the engineering department to actually deliver or if your service depends on too many external dependencies.
mason55 4y ago
The update lag has nothing to do with technical abilities. It's about things like marketing and contractual SLAs. If acknowledging downtime causes you to violate an SLA and pay a bunch of penalties then you don't want some automated script to trigger it.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > violate an SLA and pay a bunch of penalties The SLA would not depend on what the status page reported, but the actual downtime. If the script malfunctioned, you wouldn't need to pay out because it wasn't actual downtime contractually - and if it was actual downtime, I guess it makes it harder to squeeze around but that's only if someone is carefully taking legally admissible evidence from the first minute the status page reports (which screenshots alone don't always meet).
treeman79 4y ago
I’ve come across a lot of websites that respond to health checks just fine. Because the page health check doesn’t hit the database or other services.
digitallyfree 4y ago
I do this at home using LMNS, very useful to detect service failures as well as latency spikes. I ping my upstream ISP router, Google, Cloudflare, my DNS provider, and several others. Note that as another commenter said this only tells if the server is up, not if the service is working properly or not. In this case it won't work since the Zoom website is loading fine but the meetings don't work properly.

cortesoft 4y ago

That works for a website, but doesn’t work for all outage types with a service like zoom. If the website/api is responding, but you can’t create new calls, for example, the outage wouldn’t be detected.

phaer 4y ago
I think the problem might be less on the technical and more on the business-side of things. Status pages that raise customers confidence in your service are good from a marketing perspective. Automatically publishing uptime data without human review might be bad from a marketing perspective, if you don't trust the engineering department to actually deliver or if your service depends on too many external dependencies.

mason55 4y ago

The update lag has nothing to do with technical abilities. It's about things like marketing and contractual SLAs. If acknowledging downtime causes you to violate an SLA and pay a bunch of penalties then you don't want some automated script to trigger it.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
> violate an SLA and pay a bunch of penalties The SLA would not depend on what the status page reported, but the actual downtime. If the script malfunctioned, you wouldn't need to pay out because it wasn't actual downtime contractually - and if it was actual downtime, I guess it makes it harder to squeeze around but that's only if someone is carefully taking legally admissible evidence from the first minute the status page reports (which screenshots alone don't always meet).

treeman79 4y ago

I’ve come across a lot of websites that respond to health checks just fine. Because the page health check doesn’t hit the database or other services.

digitallyfree 4y ago

I do this at home using LMNS, very useful to detect service failures as well as latency spikes. I ping my upstream ISP router, Google, Cloudflare, my DNS provider, and several others. Note that as another commenter said this only tells if the server is up, not if the service is working properly or not. In this case it won't work since the Zoom website is loading fine but the meetings don't work properly.