Nikta Kanuka -
Like so many SaaS startups, we at Klipfolio use dozens of apps to run our business. Pingdom is a prime example of an app that has been seamlessly integrated into our day-to-day operations. Our DevOps team relies on Pingdom to alert them the moment something happens with one of our servers or applications. They depend on instant notifications via SMS, email, Slack… heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve designed a system that releases a carrier pigeon to deliver downtime notices to our DevOps manager.
Here’s what happens shortly after one of our DevOps guys gets a Pingdom notification about event X:
- He wants to understand why X happened, right away
- He wants to non-intrusively communicate to the rest of the organization that
- he is aware that something has happened and
- investigation is in progress
Here is where a Pingdom dashboard comes in. A well-designed DevOps dashboard can simultaneously hit both of the points above — namely, give you more information about the recent event, and, when up on a wallboard in the office, communicate the status of your app to the rest of your team.
Check out the awesome Pingdom dashboard that we have, featuring data mashups with NewRelic and Google Analytics.
Check out the live dashboard
Pingdom Gallery Klips
The example dashboard is made up of 10 Pingdom Klips that you can find in our Klip Gallery. I’ll share three in particular here: two awesome mash-up Klips, and one pure Pingdom one.
Pingdom and New Relic
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Monitoring the same metric using two different applications—like average response time from both Pingdom and New Relic—offers confidence and peace of mind. And don’t forget that we are pulling data directly from these APIs. With a script that pushes data, you’re constantly wondering if your script is still running and if the dashboard is up-to-date. With pull, you can rest easy (although feel free to be extra redundant and push data using Klipfolio’s API).
Pingdom and Google Analytics
Google Analytics? Isn’t that for marketers? While GA can give you insight into visitors, sessions, bounce rates, etc. it also offers up some metrics relevant to DevOps teams such as page load time, redirection time, server response time, and more. This Klip shows how your website is performing using data from both GA and Pingdom.
Pingdom checks
Finally, a pure Pingdom Klip is on our DevOps dashboard at all times. This is a nice summary Klip that gives you key stats on all of your Checks. The beauty of this Klip is that the entire organization benefits from having this visibility. Simply by looking up at the wallboard, we know if a Check is down and for how long there’s been an issue.
Get started building your Pingdom dashboard
Thanks to the Klips in the Gallery, you can put together a DevOps dashboard in a matter of minutes. Adding these is a great way to start building your own dashboards. We know that DevOps enter the dashboard equation more than willing to configure custom API call to develop powerful dashboard. Pro tip: Use the Gallery Klips to see exactly how we query APIs and manipulate that data to create visualizations.
Or you can build Klips from scratch using our documentation. How about creating some mash-ups with AWS or CloudWatch? You can also create multiple dashboards with different time-scales: last 4 hours for daily monitoring purposes, and last 30 days for management meetings. I think you’ll find that a DevOps dashboard using Pingdom is a great way to monitor metrics and communicate with your entire team effectively.