Performance Alerting: Is Louis Gray the Canary in Your Coal Mine?

October 10th, 2008 by smp | Filed under The Web, Web Performance, WebPerformance.Org, branding, reputation.

Yesterday in the Fast Company Live Fail Whale session [mention on Scoble's blog here], Paul Bucheit of FriendFeed jokingly said that his company’s external alerting mechanism was Louis Gray.

I cringed when I read that, as the last people who should be letting you know you have an issue are your visitors or customers. I know that FriendFeed is new and may not have the ops team that Dorion Carroll and Technorati have developed over the years, but it is still critical.

You have done a lot as a company to build a brand. Don’t let your internal and external performance sully your reputation. There are a number of low-cost and free ways to watch your performance and alert you before things break.

Louis Gray is a great guy. But he is not an objective and reliable way to alert you when something is wrong with your site.

Tags: alerting, Dorion Carroll, External Web Performance, friendfeed, Internal Web Performance, Louis Gray, Paul Bucheit, Technorati, Web Performance

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Louis Gray 1 month ago 1 point
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I would say I'm fairly objective. :-)

To be honest, FriendFeed knows about issues and typically solves them before I know about it. Paul's a good guy, but he gave me too much credit here.

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Stephen Pierzchala 1 month ago 1 point
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I know. I was using you as a very public example of how not to do it. Too many firms actually rely on their customers to tell them when their site is down.

The objective is to get companies to consider that internal monitoring is not enough - you can have the world's fastest site, and if no one can get to it, no one cares. :-)

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