Great systems are not just built. They are monitored.
MetricFire runs Graphite and Grafana as a fully managed service for growing engineering teams, taking care of storage, scaling, and version updates so your team doesn't have to. Plans start at $19/month, billed per metric namespace rather than per host, and include engineer-staffed support. Integrations work natively with Heroku, AWS, Azure, and GCP, and data is stored with 3× redundancy in SOC2- and ISO:27001-certified data centres.
Should monitoring be maintained?
As covid-19 becomes a more and more pressing issue, our community is coming to us with new ideas about sustainable monitoring. As everyone's resources get stretched and insecurities start to rise, business owners start to pair down their business to the absolute essentials. The question then arises, is an outsourced monitoring service an absolutely essential business tool?
Most business owners will first respond by trying to reduce the number of metrics they are monitoring, and only watch the absolute key indicators. If you reduce the metrics you are monitoring, it is important to be careful about which metrics you stop watching and why.
How do I decide what's needed and what's not?
You can decide what is absolutely necessary by taking a look at the four golden rules of observability. Make sure you are monitoring metrics that pertain to each golden rule to ensure you are able to fully observe your system. Also make sure you are monitoring the key resources of your system, as well as factors affecting your customer experience. Feel free to reach out and talk to us about how you can best manage your monitoring system at support@metricfire.com. We’re here to advise you on what you need to be monitoring, and how to do it as efficiently as possible.
Some business owners will respond by trying to bring their monitoring in-house, rather than paying for an outsourced company to do the work. However, there are significant operational challenges involved in monitoring your system on your own. We can remove these vulnerabilities by outsourcing to a dedicated monitoring team. For example, if you're monitoring in-house and the person in charge of monitoring on your team leaves their role, knowledge of how to monitor your operations will leave with them. With an outsourced service such as MetricFire, we can retain the knowledge of your system and keep things smooth over a long period of time.
For those of us who are monitoring in-house now, moving monitoring to an outsourced service is a great option to free up more of your resources. When your resources are low as a result of an economic downturn it's a good time to send the work off to someone else. Take a look at the story of one of our customers, who found it is much more resource consuming to run their monitoring in-house. Monitoring can easily be outsourced, where the real challenges of developing and maintaining your business can’t. With MetricFire there’s no lock in for data or even technology, since we are powered by only open source projects. The best way to get started with MetricFire is to get our free trial, or book a demo and talk to us directly.
When the economic environment gets difficult it's the most important time to know about the technical emergencies affecting your business. It’s also when it’s the hardest to have people available to deal with it. By handing off the worry of monitoring to MetricFire, you can maintain the observability of your systems while still having time to run your business.
