What creative things can you do with monitoring services?

5 points by dcaylor 14 years ago | 2 comments

What creative things have people done or can think of doing with a monitoring service, in addition to monitoring their main sites and servers?

Here were my eight initial thoughts, but I'm very curious what other people come up with. http://blog.nodeping.com/2011/09/08/eight-things-you-could-do-with-checks-on-1000-targets/

huhtenberg 14 years ago |

It reads like a plain promo piece (which it is) and it is not terribly exciting. There is nothing creative about what you listed. With 1000 randomized targets you could at least try and build a weathermap of the Internet, or something along these lines. And even that wouldn't be that creative... because there is a patent for that.

(edit) Looked at your site, FAQ included, and you have a major misunderstanding what the most important feature of a monitoring service is. From your customer's perspective. It is not pricing, it is not contractlessness and it is not 1000 targets. It is your reliability. How many monitoring locations you have? How well distributed they are geographically? How would handle the case of one segment of the Internet getting detached from another? Etc, etc. To pull a URL (or a 1000) from some location on the Internet and match the response against a regexp - there is absolutely nothing to it, anyone can do it and that's why there is a metric ton of trivial monitoring services. Do tell how you are different, and not in miniscule details.

dcaylor 14 years ago | |

Thanks for taking the time to give that input. It's a valid point about how well we're communicating on the site. My blog post completely aside, I am still genuinely interested in the question I asked in the HN post.