Releasing a brand new website to the World Wide Web is a bit like sending your kids to school for the first time. Will they be able to cope with the pressure of school life? Will they make friends? Will the school bully steal their lunch money?
OK, launching a website is nothing like sending your kids to school - but there are still plenty of things to worry about! Will the site cope with high visitor numbers? Will users discover bugs? will the site work as expected on all the weird and wonderful combination of computers, devices, and web browsers that make up the Wild West of the internet?
These risks can be greatly reduced by following the best practices when building the site, and carrying out thorough testing using as many combinations of devices and browsers as time will allow. But there is always a limit, and problems will sometimes creep through. Even NASA make the odd mistake when sending spaceships Mars, so the occasional error will happen!
Once you accept that there are always factors beyond your control, the next best thing is to keep a close eye on things so that you can react quickly should problems occur. This is where monitoring comes in.
Here at Line we use heaps of monitoring tools to keep track of our various servers, websites and apps to ensure everything is healthy and ship-shape. Many of our monitoring tools are provided "out of the box" by our server operating systems, and by the software frameworks we use to build our sites. Other monitoring tools come from 3rd parties, such as Google. We also have our own custom-made monitoring service for when "out of the box" solutions just don't cut it.
We've decided to open our custom monitoring status page to the big wide world - you can find it here:
http://status.lineindustries.com
It's not the prettiest of things, but the status site isn't out to win any beauty contests - when it comes to monitoring, there's nothing more beautiful than a long list of "everything's fine" green dots!