Item: SolarWinds Pingdom
Rating: 8
Author: Britt Gresham

Overall Satisfaction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were able to write and build our own, very powerful monitoring solution that gives us deep application health checks with the use of Pingdom. It is being used across the entire company to make sure that vital public facing applications are up and running.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Alerting is very powerful, Email and SMS alerts help drive time to resolution down.
Monitoring is completely configurable, offering multiple ways of checking services at various intervals.
Extensible through their API's that they have opened up allows you to write your own custom dashboards with ease.
Pausing and unpausing alerts allows you to have maintenance windows that do not affect your uptime.

Cons

Some features like managing user groups are sometimes hard to find and configure properly.
Over the last 4 years I have noticed some small anomalies in monitoring data.

Return on Investment

Decreased time to recovery
Increased uptime
Increased monitoring coverage

Alternatives Considered

Pingdom is by far the most cost effective solution for monitoring uptime of public facing web apps. Competitors offer services that do considerably less but cost ten times more. It is one of the few services that we have found to let us monitor from points all across the world at the same time as well as monitoring the webpages at the resolution that Pingdom allows.

Likelihood to Renew

Seeing that there is no other service out there that offers the same service for the same price it makes renewal a very easy choice for us.

Likelihood to Recommend

Pingdom is great at monitoring websites and other public facing web applications at a decent price. They use multiple nodes across the world to ensure that there is not a network problem on their end effecting your uptime negatively. In the event that they do detect a problem they alert the necessary people and automatically start running their own tests such as DNS Resolution, Trace routes, and content retrieval to help you diagnose what the exact problem is.

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