I thought it was odd that this statement seems to avoid using words like 'acquire', 'buy' or anything else the would mean Pingom has been purchased by SolarWinds. It wasn't until I clicked on the FAQ link that I was sure that an acquisition has just happened :s
The Solarwinds brand isn't as flashy as the Pingdom brand. It makes sense that they'd want to maintain as much independence as possible until they decide whether to eat it or not.
When I think Solarwinds, I think crufty enterprise shop that needs polished monitoring tools. When I think Pingdom, I think external monitoring for my startup app.
I really feel that in a world with tools like Newrelic that pingdom is starting to lose its value. I know there are significant differences between the two, but in terms of what I personally rely on each day to keep a tab on things, I can say that for me Pingdom is far less critical than it once was.
I hope this deal sees them innovate beyond a UI refresh (Which is just about all thats changed in the last 10 years)
The UI refresh was a bit of a disaster. Pingdom didn't need significant changes because it worked well at what it did. I just wanted to know when my servers went down and when they came back up.
Now with their UI change I can't even change the SMS provider to use, which means one of our devops staff doesn't get the SMSes he's supposed to. He also gets changed from the US country code to Afghanistan's. I've got a trouble ticket open with them that keeps getting auto-closed after 120 hours of "inactivity" because they said "yep, that looks like a bug, we'll let you know when fixed".
I agree, i found the UI changes to be a real downgrade to what was a perfectly usable service. Just the other day i was trying to track down an error and it took me about 10 minutes to track down the right page.
Yeah, we did that, and just had all of our PagerDuty alerts go off when Pingdom sent out their nice marketing email (which PagerDuty validly took as an "incident").
Thankfully it was basically morning, depending on the time zone.
Came here to say the same thing. Total disaster. The alerting / notification almost completely broke. We stopped getting SMSs. Can't configure contacts. Have some ghost contacts appearing in one place, but not another. The pingdom support won't help at all, or won't answer for days...
Really sad. It was a great simple service that just worked. Straightforward to manage. Did one thing and did it well. Now it's a bunch of shiny screens that end up adding confusion and it's not even working.
I doubt this acquisition was aimed at Pingdom's tech stack so much as their 26 employees and 500k+ users that SolarWinds can now upsell into more expansive monitoring solutions.
Yep. We were using them prior... and honestly their service is amazing. Very un-google from a customer support perspective - Stackdrivers support is fantastic.
All of the employees that I know are cool people and very happy there and the pay, if I remember correctly, was pretty good.
BTW, the good admins are not coming out of the standard webhost support roles. Those people are cheap, but for good reason. The higher tiers at those shops, maybe.
Maybe now they'll find the time, money, give-a-shit or whatever to address this maddening omission [1] (Can't omit check sources by geography).
If nothing else, this move will give me a recognizable name to refer to when trying to convince certain folks to dump some of the truly awful monitoring services out there. Not long ago I encountered a place that was paying one of the old giants $1100/yr per target for simple pings and email only alerts.
I've never used Pingdom (or any service like it), but I've considered building a monitoring service for a number of years. The ability to configure monitoring and/or alerting by geographic region (if not specific nodes) has always been in the top 5 list of features.
Pingdom seemed to be the service that was one of the more prominent first to market options and then promptly sat on their laurels waiting for a buy-out. That seems to have come to fruition.
Based on the quality of product Solarwinds offers, I will now go delete any remaining monitoring I've been using from them.
I think the market could use a really good monitoring platform that does a lot more than what's on the service offering from the likes of Pingdom.
I'm working on a startup[1] that provides internal & external site monitoring[2], and I hadn't thought of that feature... good call! Currently it shows 2 graphics: the response time from each location and the aggregate for the week by day. We only have New York and California locations, but we plan on expanding to Europe soon.
If anyone is having a slow day at work and wants to play, feedback is always appreciated: https://www.metrink.com/whitelabel Shameless self-promotion over :-)
Pingdom is a good product and I've used it with moderate success.
However, sometimes I can't help but chuckle at the marketing and productization genius of someone who monetized the classic `ping`! Anyway, congratulations to the pingdom team on the acquisition and hope to see a more comprehensive API from them soon.
Pingdom customers who are worried and would like to look at alternatives, we at Site24x7 have a special offer for you. Get a one year subscription for the Site24x7 Business Pack for FREE. Get in touch with support@site24x7.com.
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as a nice alternative there is also Monitis, all-in-one monitoring platform, so it is quite suitable for any operational needs. by the way, they have recently integrated with pagerduty and zapier. www.monitis.com
41 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadWhen I think Solarwinds, I think crufty enterprise shop that needs polished monitoring tools. When I think Pingdom, I think external monitoring for my startup app.
I hope this deal sees them innovate beyond a UI refresh (Which is just about all thats changed in the last 10 years)
Now with their UI change I can't even change the SMS provider to use, which means one of our devops staff doesn't get the SMSes he's supposed to. He also gets changed from the US country code to Afghanistan's. I've got a trouble ticket open with them that keeps getting auto-closed after 120 hours of "inactivity" because they said "yep, that looks like a bug, we'll let you know when fixed".
It feels like a real mess now.
Full disclosure: I work for PagerDuty.
Thankfully it was basically morning, depending on the time zone.
Their IOS app is quite good though. Every time I get an alert, I go directly to my Iphone
Really sad. It was a great simple service that just worked. Straightforward to manage. Did one thing and did it well. Now it's a bunch of shiny screens that end up adding confusion and it's not even working.
Come and check out AppNeta[1]. We have both APM[2] (like NewRelic) and NPM[3] (Gomez, Pingdom) and even more! (like SolarWinds offerings)
Disclaimer: I work for AppNeta.
[1] http://www.appneta.com
[2] http://www.appneta.com/products/traceview/
[3] http://www.appneta.com/products/appview/
All of the employees that I know are cool people and very happy there and the pay, if I remember correctly, was pretty good.
BTW, the good admins are not coming out of the standard webhost support roles. Those people are cheap, but for good reason. The higher tiers at those shops, maybe.
On SolarWinds' site, it's an acquisition, plain as can be.
On Pingdom's site, they're pretending they're 'joining forces.'
Pingdom just got bought by a public company. It sounds like they're in for a reality check.
http://www.solarwinds.com/company/newsroom/press_releases/ye...
If nothing else, this move will give me a recognizable name to refer to when trying to convince certain folks to dump some of the truly awful monitoring services out there. Not long ago I encountered a place that was paying one of the old giants $1100/yr per target for simple pings and email only alerts.
1: http://pingdom.uservoice.com/forums/113203-my-pingdom/sugges...
Pingdom seemed to be the service that was one of the more prominent first to market options and then promptly sat on their laurels waiting for a buy-out. That seems to have come to fruition.
Based on the quality of product Solarwinds offers, I will now go delete any remaining monitoring I've been using from them.
I think the market could use a really good monitoring platform that does a lot more than what's on the service offering from the likes of Pingdom.
If anyone is having a slow day at work and wants to play, feedback is always appreciated: https://www.metrink.com/whitelabel Shameless self-promotion over :-)
[1] https://www.metrink.com [2] https://www.metrink.com/whitelabel
However, sometimes I can't help but chuckle at the marketing and productization genius of someone who monetized the classic `ping`! Anyway, congratulations to the pingdom team on the acquisition and hope to see a more comprehensive API from them soon.