Cachet – Service status updates improved | Hacker News Reader

Cachet – Service status updates improved

cachethq.io

42 pointsjbrooksuk24 comments

It's not quite clear what exactly this does—apparently I can "Create, edit and delete components." and "Log incidents." and "monitor services". Some more relevant info on the pages would be nice.

It's a StatusPage.io alternative. The "Create, edit and delete components" is kind of arbitrary there.. I'll update it.

Great! Now I'll just have to get a Statuspage.io subscription to watch my catchet install. But seriously, this is cool. Creating a StatusPage-type app has actually been on my todo list and even though I've moved away from PHP I think the fact that it's built on it makes its appeal and potential for use very broad.

My first thought though was "what happens if my Catchet instance goes down"? After thinking about it for a minute I don't think this should be a big concern for most. Assuming you run Cachet on a server separate from the one you're monitoring then the chances of both going down at once are small save for instances where you put both the Cachet instance and the app you're monitoring on the same provider like a Linode or DigitalOcean and they have an outage. Then I thought you could just get a free Pingdom account and have it ping your Cachet instance every few minutes. This way you know your status page is online (which is really all you need to know about a status page) and then the status page will give you a more detailed overview of the app you're really concerned about.

Great job, thank you for making this. I'm definitely going to use it.

Hey, thanks man! Heh, you'd technically need StatusPage.io for your StatusPage.io subscription ;)

But yes, I'd advise you run it on a separate server.

Very cool, I just sat down yesterday to start hacking on a Go version of the same thing. (Go mostly just because I needed an excuse to use it and because I thought a single binary deploy option might be nice).

I'll definitely give this a shot instead!

Nice design. I'm not exactly clear about what's going on in the sample screenshot, though; when the block has two sections, are those supposed to be two messages joined together (since they occurred at the same time), or one message with additional detail?

Also, there are two grammatical errors that are a bit jarring: "We're located the upstream issue" and "Not know what happened" (possibly that's a joke?)

Thanks pimlottc, we're actively working on the design and trying to improve readability.

I believe you're talking about the incidents themselves? What you see in the screenshot isn't actually a good representation of what's happening. Instead, check out the live demo. http://cachet.herokuapp.com/

And in the mean time, I'll update the screenshots.

Screenshots updated!

If you don't want to offer hosting, consider integrating so you could do, say, 1-click "deploy to heroku."

I run a SaaS monitoring service (my profile has details) and we've been asked before to produce an installable product. We've rejected the idea not because we lack sympathy with companies that have no-hosted-saas policies, but because the reliability and stability of the service is among the most valuable features.

There's a "deploy to Heroku" button right there in the markdown..

We do, check the readme file on GitHub - it's pretty cool!

As StatusPage.io is a YC-backed startup, I wonder how this affects them... Do they feel threatened in any way? Though I guess they're really offering a service, not just a download

What StatusPage.io is doing seems trivial, except their servers with statuses may be up while yours are down. I'm surprised projects like these get VC backing.

I expect StatusPage.io could make money, don't get me wrong, but not in VC-expected-return territory.

I believe StatusPage.io is profitable - those guys do a great job :)

I doubt and don't think they should feel threatened. If I were them I wouldnt be guarding my application because it's a very simple and easy to replicate concept. The real value is in the service. You pay for StatusPage because you expect they'll have better uptime than you and they allow you to focus on building your app and communicating with your customers. They take the work of building and maintaining a status page away. Pingdom is very similar. Something you could definitely build yourself but why bother when you have better things to do with your time.

I wouldn't be threatened. One of the most poignant value propositions is about hosting.

Yeah, it seems like this is becoming more and more the business model of the present/future...

I've been following development via Twitter and noticed the news that Mozilla Brazil is using it. Going to be very interesting to see where the project goes in the next year!

It would be nice if there was a Demo setup somewhere.

the link for the demo is at the github page: https://cachet.herokuapp.com/

We've just setup a CNAME for http://status.cachethq.io too.

We do, but it should be linked on the homepage and be more visible; https://cachet.herokuapp.com

That's helpful, but it would be more interesting as a demo if it had some other events on it.

I completely agree. Unfortunately we're having issues with APC (https://github.com/cachethq/Cachet/issues/163) on Heroku and as such can't login to add them.

I'm investigating this now.

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