Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We currently integrate with a wide range of notification systems and applications to which we can send through our Up or Down alerts based on the health and status of your website on StatusCake. Sometimes though, it’s great to have these alerts coming through to a system that’s not classically used for notifications. Today we’ll take a look at how you can have your downtime alerts sent to the Zendesk Customer Service Software & Support Ticket System.

Do any of these sound familiar? One of your best engineers just put in notice that they are taking a job elsewhere because the on-call load while working for you is destroying their personal life—but you honestly thought things were fine.

There are two common approaches to incident response: qualitative and quantitative. Each approach has its pros and cons. Meanwhile, an enterprise’s decision to take a qualitative or quantitative approach to incident response could have far-flung effects on the business, its employees and its customers.

We’ve today introduced a fully functional API for use with our Public Reporting tool. This allows you to carry out all of the functions that you would in app, but now you can automate and schedule these tasks instead of needing to complete them manually.

Ever wanted to keep a backup of StatusCake data without manual entry or usage of the API? This article will take you through a different and automated method of doing so for the Up and Down test alerts. This is done with the help of the Zapier service, and the data will be stored in Google Sheets.

“I need to be notified if there’s a significant event ongoing with SignalFx.” This is what I tell my team. However, despite being the CTO of a monitoring company, creating the right set of alerts for me to stay informed of incidents in progress or potential issues was harder than it seemed at first glance. Why?

The pressure in the natural gas pipelines under three Massachusetts communities spiked to 12 times their normal level last week, just before the explosions and fires that destroyed dozens of homes and killed an 18-year-old man. Columbia Gas went under fire for their mismanagement of the incident. The NTSB says a Columbia Gas control room in Columbus, Ohio, registered pressures of 6 pounds per square inch last Thursday in pipelines that are intended to carry just 0.5 PSI.

Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network is a non-profit organ procurement organization that coordinates organ and tissue donation and provides public education on donation in Illinois and northwest Indiana. As one of 58 OPOs that make up the nation’s donation system, Gift of Hope works with 180 hospitals and serves 12 million people in their donation service area.

In my previous post, I talked about the real costs of alert fatigue — the toll it can take on your engineers as well as your business — and some suggestions for rethinking alerting. In part 2 of this series, I’ll share some best practices for fine-tuning Sensu to help reduce alert fatigue.

Have you ever gotten that dreaded text from your boss: “The site is down”? Maybe you were meeting with a customer. Or having dinner with your family. Maybe you were presenting at a conference. Doesn’t matter. Whatever else you were doing, now you’re doing emergency incident communication too. You check in with your team leads and confirm there is a problem. You let your boss know the response is under way.