Our Story
Why Alertyx?
Alertyx started out of our personal pain of finding a service that could monitor our infrastructure and alert us precisely at the time of failure, wherever we are. Although email and SMS alerts are available through some of the existing monitoring services, neither are much helpful on occasions, say late in the night. What was really needed (& has been sorely missing) was a way to get an alert phone call. With advancement in web telephony and speech synthesis, we realized that we could piece the missing puzzle piece of calling the site/server administrator if the monitored server goes down.
Encouraged by our own experience and usefulness of it, we felt that a lot many could benefit this service. Hence, we decided to refine the prototype to make it to fully functional service which could be used by masses to create reliable infrastructure.
Lack of UDP monitoring
As we started exploring the existing monitoring services for our own need, we were surprised by the fact that UDP monitoring was completely missing. Since many VoIP & media server runs of UDP, expecting only TCP services to be monitored is only half the game. We needed a solution which can cater to both TCP and UDP equally. After spending a few days on it, we took a step back and researched this missing void across other providers and found that they all didn't support UDP. Alertyx supports TCP and UDP from the get-go.
Prohibitive Cost
Another important reason was cost. Most monitoring websites charge a reasonably high monthly fee to monitor. While some monitoring cost is justified, over a period of time, this cost starts piling up. We have a completely different model - pay-as-you-go. Pay for credits that are used to alert you in case your server goes down. There is no monthly subscription fee or any other prohibitive cost.
Simple, yet missing, features
Then there are small features which could take advantage of the knowledge of service status. For example, even before I get notified, I would want that my service provider is also notified immediately so that they can investigate right away. This has been missing and we believe it is one of the simple, yet an absolutely necessary feature.