If you don’t fail fast enough, you’re on the slow road to success.
One idea that I recently failed was using a screen and sitebeagle to monitor sites.
It’s not a complete failure… it works okay.
Due to budget constraints, I put my screen and sitebeagle set up on a production server.
For some reason that production server ran out of space and became unresponsive. Screen no doubt caused this. I was alerted of the issue and did a reboot.
After the reboot, although Amazon’s monitoring tools told me the server was okay, the server was not. The MySQL database was in an EBS volume and needed to be re-mounted.
The solution I now have in place is still screen and sitebeagle. But I use another server with screen and sitebeagle on it to monitor the production server that gave me the issue in the first place.
It’s a question of who will monitor the monitors… in a world of web sites with few site users the answers pretty bleak. In the world of super popular commercial sites, the answer’s clear. The wisdom of crowds will monitor the web sites.