Do you track uptime of third party tools?

Question

As a developer it's not uncommon for me to investigate a problem only to discover that it's a transient issue with a third party tool.Some third party tools have status pages (AWS, Twilio, etc) and others use Twitter. However it's not a habit for me to check these pages before investigating an issue. Many have status notifications via email, slack, etc but I don't necessarily have those open while working out of Gitlab.So two questions: (1) Is this a big problem for you, and if so (2) How do you work around or solve it?

simplecto · Accepted Answer

You can write scripts for nagios to monitor those endpoints or do end-to-end tests for you. I have done this in banking , healthcare, and gaming.
On a smaller scale you can probably just have cron jobs run these and email/sms you when things fall down.
Forgot to add -- generally though in production you will detect very early on when your code starts crashing or gets rejection rates.
In my day job we generally know when FB/Apple/Google are down/degraded before the larger internet because of scale and integration with their payments and our monitoring.

verdverm · Answer

This is actually an interesting opportunity. I have experienced this problem and found their status pages are most likely biased.Having good 3rd party monitoring would be useful.