Barkme

Uptime monitoring for websites, applications and APIs

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Main function of digital solutions and software in general is to automate something by turning the routine task into a process. Sometimes the pain point comes from internal things, and you just realize it's a good moment to solve it and puzzle into a real product. We faced the need to monitor our own sites, web applications, APIs and the same kind of assets for our different clients. But from one place, externally, without depending on different credentials, servers, tools or technology stacks. Solving this each time in a different context is time-consuming, and the maintenance becomes tech debt. Using external providers and ready-to-go solutions like UptimeRobot, Pingdom or Datadog is an option, but we decided in Well Digit to do it our way: super simple, set up in 3 clicks, and connected to a variety of notification channels where we and our clients live. Telegram, Email, Slack, Linear, Trello. But what exactly should we monitor? Does the endpoint return 2xx? Does it answer within X seconds? Not only this, but also the health of domains. There are some not instantly obvious things you never think about until they hit you in the middle of random Saturday. Your domain gets blacklisted for some reason and DNS resolvers refuse to resolve it. Or the domain used for transactional mailings turns out to be spam-flagged. Or another case, which we've pretty sure you've faced at least once: the domain silently expires, or the SSL certificate runs out. Nobody missed the email from the registrar, it just was pointed at the wrong person two years ago, or at an email address that no longer exists. So the system warns you at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before expiry, for both the certificate and the domain registration, long before day X comes. So it's a necessity, not a privilege, to know quickly if any problem, and before anyone else, like clients and customers, notifies you by themselves That's why we built Barkme. It barks 🐶 when a site or web application goes down, and it does it almost immediately, so you receive the notification on any channel that suits you. We use it for our clients and for our own sites. Happy to share it and invite you to try it. Add some supervision of your web assets outside your server and domain settings. Sometimes we need an alternative angle of view. We always need to be proactive and know what is going on with the things we are responsible for.