I like the idea of a totally independent 3rd party monitoring system. For that we use pingdom, and its job is basically to tell us if our public services are up

I like the idea of a totally independent 3rd party monitoring system. For that we use pingdom, and its job is basically to tell us if our public services are up from to the outside world. Basically it is an additional perspective and a redundant level of monitoring. But I view it mostly as an up/down layer of monitoring. Extremely important, but simple and not really meant to give insight into the complexity of our system.