Waking up at 3 AM to deal with a downed service is a special kind of pain, isn’t it? A cross between annoyance, fury, and half-asleep melodrama. Maybe you curse yourself or your team. It’s ok. We’ve all been there. Here at Uptime.com we want to help you get through life’s painful little moments with some advice on how to choose a web monitoring provider. It’s what we do, so we hope our advice and suggestions will lead you to a good fit.

Big features make headlines, but they can be a challenge to deploy without staying dedicated to the finish line. Even the best laid projects can fall victim to time creep as more features are added and the idea gets refined. What’s on paper looks great!

While Black Friday has, in recent years, bled into Cyber Monday; for the 2020 season we’re not focussed on an advertised day or two of deals. Instead, we’re suggesting that you batten down the hatches and scale up your monitoring for ‘Cyber Season’ because physical retail locations closing for major sale days is just the first wave.

Collection doesn’t equal detection. When your eyeballs are pulsing from the stress of looking at multiple screens, logs, performance metrics, and messages of interpretation from your team; it’s challenging not to experience your own personal system overload. “Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis.

George Romero’s zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead, is the perfect analogy for a lot like the DevOps experience. Your cluster of services is like your Monroeville Mall. Your safe haven where you live and work for years on end, toiling away at survival. But who are the zombies? The answer isn’t always clear when you’re busy chasing down alerts at 2 AM.

It’s always in the early dawn hours – an SMS alert on your phone forces you to drag up your eyelids and look at a text: your site traffic has surpassed its usual threshold. You start to run through the possibilities as you drift off in search of a few more minutes of sleep but traffic keeps rapidly increasing and your brain jumps to a conclusion…could it be a DDoS Attack?

We once asked whether it was possible to remain both incompetent and in business. We concluded that while incompetency is not a desirable trait, it is surprisingly possible to remain in business for a fairly short while. What we have learned in Q3 is that complacency allows internet downtime to fester. Our Destimate for Q3 of 2020 is fairly high. We expect the average business with monitoring and minimal IT resources stand to lose 17.4% of revenue on the conservative side, and as much as 22.35%.

It was a dark and stormy night. Not really, of course; it was warm and pleasantly mild (the weather never seems to co-operate on these occasions), but indulge me by imagining appropriate meteorological conditions for the spine-tingling story I’m about to relate. It was Morgan’s very first night on call, and they were a mite nervous, as you can imagine.

Migrations carry a setup cost and engineers don’t work for free. Even under the most ideal conditions, it’s possible moving data between web monitoring providers will result in some missing feature or differing functionality. That’s just life. If you’re facing a migration you sometimes have to make do with the cards you’re dealt. But it’s not all doom and gloom! We hope this checklist will help you play like you’ve got pocket aces.

If there’s no customer, there’s no job. In a competitive marketplace, every site element matters from the functionality of your service to your UI; your documentation to your marketing. Your SLA should mirror that structure. Building a strong customer experience is about consistency on every level. The key is visibility, offering all the verification your customers need with an intuitive click of the mouse.