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Comment by verelo | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those posts that drives me a little crazy :P

We recently started a web monitoring company (in beta) http://www.verelo.com to tackle situations just like this. Pingdom monitors every 60 seconds, its just not enough if you want to make claims like "we were only down for 6 minutes". If you want to make claims at a single digit minute level you need to check more regularly, and your checks need to be robust. We offer monitors that check as regularly as every 5 seconds.

We're going to monitor those same 6 sites for the next 30 days using our service at Verelo and provide comparative results when the next 37signals blog post comes out.

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Sounds good! Remember to setup transaction tracking, though. Just doing pings or http get and expecting 200 OK on a page is not enough for this to be interesting.

For Basecamp, we login, go to a project, and post a message, or something like that. So you catch as much as possible.

I use Pingdom, but wish they could monitor more frequently for exactly the reasons you mention. In theory my site can be unavailable for several seconds each minute, without showing downtime in the stats. I signed up for your service, but looks like it is invite only right now?

I think most peoples invites have been approved at the moment.

We have a big release scheduled for Feb. Some cool new features like custom useragent strings and PagerDuty integration are going to be pushed out. We're excited :)

Looks useful. I've got a long-poll based monitor part written that I must get into a sensible state and chukc on github at some point. I was intending for it to monitor a few bits of mine in a semi distributed manner (each f my little bits of the net monitoring each other. The long-poll would mean I could "tick" every tens seconds (or even every second, though 10 was the plan) using very little bandwidth (it wouldn't have to be polling a web server either, but in all my cases it would be with the web server doing other local checks (Is the DB up?, Can I login?, No new errors in the critical-stuff log?, ...).

I might have to give your service a look until I finish my little toy, if I ever do.

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