Decide who responds
Agree ownership for each monitored system in advance. An unowned alert is a notification, not a response.
How it works
From something you rely on to a signal you can act on.
The loop is short on purpose. Every step that a monitoring service adds between a failure and a response is a step where the failure gets more expensive.
The loop
Four steps, and none of them are a project.
You should be able to get from nothing to genuinely watched in one sitting, and you should be able to explain the whole arrangement to a colleague in a sentence.
-
1
Add what you rely on
Point BinaryCanary at your websites, email servers, databases, and any device on a custom port, or simply ping an IP address. It's fully hosted, so there's nothing to install.
-
2
Checked every minute, from multiple locations
Each monitor can be checked as often as every minute from our monitoring locations in California, Oregon, Virginia, and Ireland, independent of your own infrastructure.
-
3
Every failure confirmed before an alert
When one monitoring node sees a failure, a separate node on a different network checks again. Only a confirmed failure triggers an alert, so a passing network glitch doesn't wake anyone up.
-
4
The right people hear first
Alerts go out by email, SMS, SMS by email, or phone call (on the Hyper plan), following your escalation profile. One acknowledgement stops further alerts, and do-not-disturb periods keep off-duty contacts quiet.
Why outside-in
The watcher shouldn't share the fate of the watched.
If your monitoring lives on the box that just went down, you don't have monitoring — you have a coincidence.
Checking from outside your own infrastructure is what makes the answer trustworthy. It is also why a monitoring service is worth buying rather than building on the side of another job.
What comes after the alert
Most of the cost of an outage is decided before it happens.
Monitoring tells you something is wrong. What turns that into a short incident rather than a long one is groundwork you do while nothing is on fire.
Confirm, then communicate
Check the signal, then say something — internally and, where it affects them, to customers. Silence costs more than an imperfect update.
Adjust what you watch
Every incident tells you something about your coverage. The useful question afterwards is what would have told you sooner.
Next step
Run the loop against your own systems.
14 days free, then from $2 a month. Already have an account? Log in.