The case for ‘App Watcher’
App Watcher is a new service (actually that’s a fib, it’s been around more than 3 years, so that’s not a good start!), it’s a new ‘public’ service I offer that anyone can sign up to. So who is it for, what does it do, and what do you get for your £25.00 a month.
So who is it for? Anyone who has a website, eCommerce store, cloud app, mobile app backend or any other publicly available web based endpoint – so that’s all of us then! More importantly this should be something you depend upon, a revenue stream or application without which your business will struggle to operate. Within that it’s geared more towards the SME sector who don’t have dedicated, fully skilled IT and developer support on hand 24/7 – that combination is where App Watcher is of value.
What does it do? Well on it’s own it merely monitors, it checks periodically to make sure that the monitored web service is up and responding – and then let’s you know if anything looks amiss – normally by email and / or SMS. Additionally we also keep an eye on the related domain name and any attached SSL Certificate to warn you when they are likely to expire so you can mitigate downtime before it happens – however none of that is particularly new, if all you want is monitors and alerts then there are great services already out there such as Pingdom for one that will look after.
So our justification, is the worst case scenario, we offer peace of mind that there will be real, dedicated, independent human support available – and already investigating – should your monitored web site, app or presence go down unexpectedly. As soon as is practical we will manually investigate, diagnose, and provide a report back letting you know exactly where the problem lies, and give you and indication as to who to speak to to get it resolved – and remain accessible until it’s back.
Consider the scenario, you’ve commissioned an e-commerce store a few years back, they person on staff familiar with the details is has since left, but the store is up and running, earning you money, and all is good – until the day it stops. What’s wrong, and how do you fix it?
- Has the domain name expired? Ex employee registered a few domains – always good to keep control of your domains and not leave it to the hosting company, but who did he register them with? Have we paid the bill.
- Who is it hosted with, possibly the developer you originally contracted, but you don’t have much to deal with her now as the site is all done, and chances are she set that up with a third party anyway, or even a reseller – will they act on out instructions, or was the hosting with the domain name company?
- Or could it be the SSL Cert, vague memory of our IT firm setting something up, or was that for the mail server – I forget.
- Where to start, and who do you trust, no one likes admitting an error so are the answers you’re getting back ones you can trust?
This is where we come in, we’re independent so no vested interest in anything other than being truthful and honest. We also have years of experience, we know where to look, what to test, and how to come to a quick, accurate conclusion – and more importantly communicate that to you in ways that are useful, relevant, and helpful to pointing you in the direction of the resolution to your woes.
We’ll also provide you with a written report to use for your records, or to forward on upstream to any interested parties to help you bypass their first line support and give hard facts to the engineers that can resolve it, after all we’ve done the detective work for them.
All that, an insurance if you will, from just £25.00 per month, and no risk to you as no minimum term, you can cancel when you wish. To signup our see the options just head over to our signup page to get started or if you have any questions just drop us a message via [email protected].
Look forward to having you onboard.