K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
In the IoT world, a common headache for customers is supporting their product after it’s released. To provide support with excellence, it’s important to rely on the intelligent use of meta-support tools to amplify the support team’s work. In this post, we’ll highlight some of these tools.
The Tools of the Support Trade
Datadog is an excellent monitoring service that can be extended and hooked into in some incredible ways. This system keeps 24/7 surveillance on our cloud infrastructure, dedicated hosts, websites, and databases.
The features we use the most are the monitors. Monitors can be simple smoke-test-style checks where a tool goes to a URL and makes sure it returns the expected HTTP code. Monitors can also be complex, carefully designed checks that pass input to the tool or a query to a database. For example, we have one check that queries a Redshift database’s rows by time, averages the number of entries made in the past hour, and returns a warning if the value is below a specified value.
Datadog has excellent first-class support for all major cloud vendors, and if there isn’t a pre-made tool, the platform is customizable enough to let you build it yourself!
In theory, this could be replicated by a master server pinging other servers or a free tool (like the excellent Cockpit Project). However, Datadog includes some unique sauce additions: its visualization of monitors and metrics is fantastic out of the box and has incredibly granular tools to, say, individually mute monitors once they have been triaged. When it is necessary to alert a support team member, Datadog hooks into our slack channel to communicate to the respective support role.
Certain critical level events also send an automated text to the on-call team member using Twilio (more on that later).
Continue reading: https://www.iotforall.com/meta-support-tools-for-supporting-iot
The Tools of the Support Trade
Datadog is an excellent monitoring service that can be extended and hooked into in some incredible ways. This system keeps 24/7 surveillance on our cloud infrastructure, dedicated hosts, websites, and databases.
The features we use the most are the monitors. Monitors can be simple smoke-test-style checks where a tool goes to a URL and makes sure it returns the expected HTTP code. Monitors can also be complex, carefully designed checks that pass input to the tool or a query to a database. For example, we have one check that queries a Redshift database’s rows by time, averages the number of entries made in the past hour, and returns a warning if the value is below a specified value.
Datadog has excellent first-class support for all major cloud vendors, and if there isn’t a pre-made tool, the platform is customizable enough to let you build it yourself!
In theory, this could be replicated by a master server pinging other servers or a free tool (like the excellent Cockpit Project). However, Datadog includes some unique sauce additions: its visualization of monitors and metrics is fantastic out of the box and has incredibly granular tools to, say, individually mute monitors once they have been triaged. When it is necessary to alert a support team member, Datadog hooks into our slack channel to communicate to the respective support role.
Certain critical level events also send an automated text to the on-call team member using Twilio (more on that later).
Continue reading: https://www.iotforall.com/meta-support-tools-for-supporting-iot
