Nimble Industries
Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing...
Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out...
That’s right. You’ve nailed it. Your status page rocks. Your doing all the things right, and so your status page is awesome. Here is why: It is Accessible Your status page is available to the public. Search engines crawl and index your status page. It’s easy to find. When there are problems with your service, your users don’t need to go searching through emails to find...
Is your software up to date? Have you been applying those gem security patches? Are you keeping up to date with python version upgrades? Have you ever been surprised at just how far behind one of your packages is? We need a metric to measure and track the age of source code dependencies. The software industry has settled on great practices like static code analysis, as well as automated...
StatusGator is a status page aggregator. We monitor the world’s status pages and provide a unified dashboard which tracks the status pages each user cares about. But how do we collect and normalize all this data? To get started with StatusGator, you choose the services you already use from our list. For each service, you select the specific components from their status pages that you depended on...
If you’ve considered having a status page for your service but are discouraged by the pricing of status page services – consider running an open source status page system like Cachet. This post explains how to install and configure a Cachet status page on the popular DigitalOcean hosting platform. You can run Cachet on DigitalOcean for as little as $5/ month. Create Your Droplet If...
Recently, we began using IP geolocation within StatusGator to learn where are users are located. We are happy to say that it’s working out well. We hoped to use these insights to tune our marketing. To that end, we added the Ahoy gem to help collect information related to how our advertising campaigns are going. The Ahoy gem also uses the geolocation gem to lookup IP addresses. This...
In custom software, the cycle of write, atrophy, rewrite is all too common. Many product owners too reluctant to embrace maintenance and sustaining engineering. A vicious cycle of expensive rewrites ensues. Businesses feel bruised by developers and experience unhealthy surges in cost and business disruption. Think hard before deciding to throw away what you have in pursuit of the greenfield:...
StatusGator has a few thousand users. Recently I grew curious as to where you all are. Surely it would be interesting to learn a little about where they are from. The results are pretty interesting. I’m pleased to report StatusGator helps users in 85 different countries! The top ten are: USA – 1,061 UK – 207 Canada – 115 India – 72 Australia – 70 Germany...
Nimble Industries