Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Some of your most critical infrastructure runs on AWS EC2, so it's pretty damn important to know when your EC2 instances shut down. Sure, chances are someone in your organisation will start kicking and screaming within 30 minutes of a particularly important instance shutting down, but we can do better than that. When it comes to monitoring and customers (whether inside your org or outside), being proactive wins you a lot of points.

I can't believe it's April already. OnlineOrNot now lets you automatically pause checks on a recurring basis with maintenance windows, there's better support for timezones, loading a lot of data got faster, and more.

When you're part of a small team running a system with thousands of users or more, it can be pretty daunting to think about going on holiday, or even relaxing for a weekend. "What if it goes down, and I'm not there to fix it?!" you ask yourself. While you can never really guarantee that nothing will go wrong, you can take some steps to minimise your risk of things going wrong.

curl is one of those programs that feels like its always been there for you in a pinch, like when you're trying to debug what your API is doing, and yet we never take the time to actually learn how to use it (I only ever used it via "copy as curl" from my browser's devtools). It's insanely powerful too, run curl --help all to see what I mean. In this article, we're going to take the time to learn what we can do with a tiny subset of curl's options, so we don't have to look them up every time.

The other day I realized that while I write monthly updates on what's new in OnlineOrNot, and keep the changelog updated, I didn't have a yearly review of what was shipped, and what folks could expect from the coming year - so here we are!

Chances are, you've heard one of the main promises of serverless compute: "you only pay for what you use". While convenient when starting a new project, once you start to get continuous usage on that compute, you start to realize you're paying a hefty premium for that convenience. If you're using AWS Lambda like I am, chances are that "for what you use" part isn't completely true either.

A quieter month this time around: you can now customize your status pages, there are additional overall statuses for status pages, and I fixed a few bugs.

This month I continued adding features to OnlineOrNot's status page functionality, while also taking the time to fix bugs, and add an integration for Pingdom.

If you remember the last update, I originally planned to ship quite a few features in June. Life and family had to take priority for me, so they didn't get done. Thankfully, I'm building OnlineOrNot for the extremely long term, so there's no rush to ship as fast as possible. A fair few things did get shipped though.

In May I mostly took the time to plan out the rest of the year, as well as one big feature to make OnlineOrNot's incident management more realistic.