Role & Background
Created and operated a free web-server uptime monitoring, SLA reporting and downtime-alerting service used by hundreds of users.
- Independently designed, developed, deployed and maintained the application and its supporting infrastructure.
- Kept the service operating for more than five years as a practical production platform rather than a demonstration project.
Production Service
A free monitoring platform operated for more than five years
CrashSignal was an independently built and operated LAMP-based monitoring service rather than a demo project. Users configured the websites and servers they wanted monitored, the check interval, alert behavior and the people who should receive incident notifications.
The application remained in production for more than five years and served hundreds of users, making reliability of the monitoring system itself part of the engineering problem.
Distributed Monitoring
Central scheduling with geographically distributed workers
The architecture used the same general distributed-monitoring principles developed around Slacron: a central application maintained users, monitors and historical data, while scheduled jobs dispatched checks to remote servers in multiple regions.
Monitoring nodes performed availability and response tests and returned results to the central system for reporting, alerting and incident-history processing. This made it possible to see not only whether a service responded, but how it behaved from different locations.
Operational Reporting
Uptime history, incidents and SLA-oriented evidence
The service accumulated monitoring history into uptime and response-time reports and preserved incident records around service interruptions. Alerts could be distributed to multiple account users according to their notification preferences.
That reporting made the platform useful to IT teams that needed more than a one-time ‘site down’ notification: they could retain a history of what happened and when, including evidence useful in wider operational or provider discussions.
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