Being able to monitor things in production is a very useful thing. Getting alerts when something goes down, maybe getting some information about the reason why the service is considered to be "down". But more important than you, yourself getting alerts, it's important to be able to tell users when there are problems, and when they are fixed.
Since we decided to go full-speed ahead with WeRemote, one of the things I could quickly put together was a status page. This is essential for any service users depend on.
While browsing the web for something really simple that would require a really small implementation, I came across UptimeRobot.com. This service offers up to 5 free monitors and it also provides alerts for when the services being monitored are down. How cool is that?
I instantly created an account and set up monitors for our main application(s): the marketing site, the dashboard appplication, search engine and analytics service. So after a little bit of fiddling with configs in the UptimeRobot dashboard and then adding a new DNS record, status.weremote.eu was born. And it looks like this:
I am currently working to get search and analytics to talk about their "health" since they're some really simple tools with endpoints that only serve their intended purpose. They will need a healthcheck endpoint that would return a response UptimeRobot can digest and treat as "OK".
Meanwhile, whenever you think something is wrong with the service, you can definitely check status.weremote.eu