Ask HN: When something goes very wrong | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When something goes very wrong

4 pointsandrewfromx10 comments

When a server goes down, or some other 911 business disaster happens, how about an app JUST for communication during that time. Features would include:

1. CEO can wakeup anyone he needs to. App will make a loud noise even at 3am.

2. App will require monthly fire drills to make sure everyone has app installed and it's working.

3. App is hosted on entirely different network than normal one so if the problem is your server is down, you can still talk to your team to fix that server.

Any other apps in the market already do this?

View on HN

PagerDuty should fit the bill, it's their core competency. You won't need fire drills, since you can see if folks are acking and resolving alerts. Disclaimer: I work there.

Realize also that exceptional uptime is not easy to achieve. If you want to sell this service, you also need to have incredibly reliable infrastructure.

Example: I worked at a VoIP company. A mishandled call by another carrier in the chain led to the death of a child (it took several minutes to actually reach emergency services in the right country).

You don't want to advertise that your app is available when everything else has failed unless it always is.

Sounds like 3N which is now Everbridge. http://www.everbridge.com/

PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps have similar features.

We use the last one for our automated on-call, works ok most of the time.

Usually, monitoring and alerting system are isolated from your core network by design. It's just good practice.

what are the top 3 monitoring and alerting system apps out there today?

i guess https://www.opsgenie.com is one?

Depends on what you are monitoring. There are way too many to list.

A friend is thinking about starting a company to build an app for the description in parent. Can you think of like an OPS911 RedAlert App that can make a loud noise on someone's phone at any hour?

And if I put my phone on silent? You cannot override this, on iPhone at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com