During the years we have had many systems going down. Perhaps due to lack of memory. Or due to a changed password. Or some service account being removed.
Most of these systems were quite easy to monitor, like “website x is down” or “disc y is running low on spac”e etc.

There are hundreds of monitoring systems to do this.

However, there were some “silent failures” (nonevents)  that was a bit harder to monitor. Like automatic imports/exports and reports sent out by email or text/sms.

Working with our Enecto systems we now ran into this problem again. Reports that were supposed to be delivered failed to be sent out by email. And nobody in our team noticed. Even though we copied ourselves on the daily report emails..

And when a customer finally called after a few days we were embarrassed and decided this would never happen again!

But how to monitor something that was supposed to happen?
But did’t?

After going through the whole internet we found some “dead mans switch” systems but these failed to meet our standards. Either too technical or too specialized.

So, being a small software company we built our own system.
We used one of my old domains, perpetus.com ( Perpetuus is Latin for “continuous, entire or universal”) and built a sort of egg clock system.
Step one is to create a monitor.
The monitor is basically a countdown timer that resets the countdown each time the monitor url is accessed
Or when the special email address for the monitor receives an email.

Also, we have something called Testament. This is the last will of the monitor and is the action/actions performed if the monitor countdown reaches zero.  Right now these actions can be sent as email or text/sms messages.

For our developer friends we also have a basic API that allows to create monitors on-the-fly 🙂

Ready to try Perpetus? Just log in at https://www.perpetus.com !

(During the Beta no credit card details are needed but alerts are limited to emails).

/Mikael Runhem, Pergite Software AB