Let's look at the monitoring of a social network for example. You should monitor the ratio between male and female signups. If 100% of your signups are dudes, your webserver will still happily return HTTP 200 and your monitoring system will say everything is fine - but something is really wrong, e.g. the gender selection in the signup process is broken.
Your monitoring system also has to send you an alert if the number of messages that are sent per second is only half of what they were 5 minutes ago or if half the notification emails that you send to your users bounce.
ProdEagle.com let's you monitor whatever you want with almost no engineering work to be done.
All you need to do is increment a counter on the server side whenever something interesting happens, for example a female user signs up. With the ProdEagle library (available in PHP, Python, Java) this can be done in one line:
increment_counter("Signup.Female"); increment_counter("Signup.Total");
The counters get automatically exported every minute to prodeagle.com (the webapp that is your dashboard). On the dashboard you get beautiful graphs of your counters and can setup alerts if some counters drop bellow or exceed a value. With the two counters above you could already setup very interesting graphs and alerts. Examples of what ProdEagle would support out of the box are:
This can all be done with a few mouse clicks. ProdEagle is free of charge, you can just give it a try on prodeagle.com.
