Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down | Hacker News Reader

Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

etherpad.com

22 pointsanson31 comments

We do this with Chatterous.com, and it works perfectly. We set up a group, added our monitoring email as a member and have it email the group when something goes wrong. We get alerts on our phone, IM, or email. The best part is that one of us also can respond (via phone or IM) to let the others know someone is taking action on the alert.

I send emails.

a) Way more reliable.

b) Also land on my phone [with vibration/sound alert]

c) I can put a lot more details in them since there is no 140 chars limit

d) Much easier to do: one line of code - old and simple tech from the 80s (sendmail) beats ugly kids of tomorrow (Twitter) any day of the week!

Mr. Schmidt was right. :-P

We send emails too, but it's also nice to get a TXT on your phone for really urgent information such as a problem with the server.

I think his point was that twitter-to-sms isn't always as prompt as you want it to be.

YMMV, but in my experience twitter would be prompter than the typical SMS service from a big carrier. More reliable, too.

Are you arguing that twitter-to-sms (not sms-to-twitter, which i have never experienced lag with) is a quicker trip than sms-to-sms? My provider is Verizon and my experience is VERY different than what you assert.

And this is coming from someone who has completely bought into the "OMGTWITTER" phenomenon. ;)

Why not just email to yournumber@yourcarrier.net and get it as an sms too?

The author addressed this in the article.

But then he chooses the second most unreliable route?

I think this approach is neat and novel, but ultimately I don't believe they've solved their problems.

YAPS/SMSClient with a good gateway SMS provider, if the SMS is that critical. I don't understand why email only is a failure, assuming they have push email to their phone (and if you don't, well why not?)

We do this for both http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cogenuity (http://twitter.com/cogenuity) and http://www.code-roller.com (http://twitter.com/code_roller)

What do you do when Twitter is down?

Why not use pingdom for monitoring like Twitter does.

http://www.pingdom.com/reports/wx4vra365911/check_overview/?...

We use pingdom at 3b and love it.

gah, what is with the 800's ms average response time?

is it safe to say that's pingdom's connection?

They have monitoring locations around the world, but I've been getting unusually high pings from their Berkeley location.

Leaving the Twitter feed public could actually be a nice way to make site status and maintenance transparent with your users.

With the amount of time Twitter is down would make this an interesting test.

How much are they down these days? I thought they had gotten past the massive reliability issues they used to have.

They've been on and off for me all day today.

/metoo

That's not Twitter. That's you. I haven't seen Twitter down in months.

I don't have time to do a screen grab of the fail whale for you. Trust me, I'm not making this up.

imho, twitter (and others like it) will morph into a public messaging protocol. as more and more people use it the signal will get drowned by the noise. eventually the only worthwhile way of using twitter will be via enhanced filtering rules for meaningful information from people you know and follow.

twitter is really like a public pastebin with great api support which will allow you to command and control computers remotely. soon the posted messages will be encrypted nuggets taking the Public out of public.

If the signal gets drowned out by the noise, that's your fault as a user. You either follow too many people or follow the wrong people. Twitter essentially acts as a whitelist-based messaging platform.

Note the word "whitelist"

as programmers, we always know it is "the users fault." but as users, we expect a service to have value and "just work." i do specifically mention getting meaningful information from following users you know.

but how do you find those users? enhanced filtering keyed on multiple vectors will become the only useful mechanism for consuming information from not only those you dont follow but also from those you do.

as it stands i tweet on both professional and personal topics. and so do those that i follow. now if i know these people personally than i may be interested in their personal tweets. but if i do not, than i dont want non-relevant tweets cloggin up my feed.

enhanced clients with better, granular consumption controls are the only way forward.

You don't think that users are capable of deciding who is worth following and who isn't, but you expect them to employ "enhanced filters"?

There will always be people who get a kick out of following/friending celebrities, and those who will use twitter for more personal communication or other uses. It doesn't make either behavior right or wrong or more rewarding or less rewarding. But the people who claim that twitter sucks because the interaction isn't personal (or something along those lines) are doing it wrong. They want something specific out of a service but have (possibly unknowingly) set it up to do the complete opposite.

My site, with my 8 dollar a month shared hosting plan, is down FAR less than Twitter.

Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.

Actually it is very simple: adding Twitter to the mix adds one more "moving part". Shooting a simple email and then multiplexing it (via aliasing, for instance) to X recipients is easier and more reliable. Create an address like my-startup-site-is-down@gmail.com and forward to X other destinations from there (including Twitter if you want), and send your notifications to that address using standard 20+ year old protocols and tools, instead of some 3rd party proprietary stuff which was "released often, released early" and hasn't crashed "in months"

It's slightly more nuanced than you're making it sound. For one thing, Twitter may very well be more reliable than your email system (YMMV). For another, email doesn't generally beep loudly and alert you.

The idea that an additional part automatically weakens a system is reductive. It doesn't necessarily weaken it at all.

I've seen the fail whale 2 times today. Refreshing worked, but the problems there aren't entirely solved.

Serious downtime and downtime are not the same, and if twitter is down for a few minutes that means a few minutes of not receiving an SMS because you're routing your services through them.

You could probably pair this advice with http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com