I posted this on the blog but I thought I'd repeat it here:

The simian army isn't AWS only. :) Some of it runs on other stacks.

And the best part is, it is open source! So if you wanted to leverage the simian army, it wouldn't be that hard to modify it to run on whatever stack you want and then submit the changes back. :)

We just started using PagerDuty to deliver our Nagios alerts to landlines and mobile phones after losing confidence in Vodafone's pager network.

The other thing we like is the integration with HipChat to deliver alerts into our NOC chat room.

Overall we've been quite impressed....will be more impressed if you folks run into actual trouble but we still get our alerts :)

Annecdotal I know, however: pager duty is the only service we rely on that has yet to go down on us. These guys are solid!

I like that tip on how to simulate a slow network too.

My first impression from the title was that this is a post-mortem for an actual failure on Friday. But after reading your post the title made more sense ;)

Great post!.

It's Wednesday!