Christmas is still a busy time on the web. With new computers for Christmas and days off work there’s plenty of time for Internet users to be out there surfing your site. But what if your site is down? Perhaps then it’s not such a Happy Christmas!
Through a combination of factors – including our geographically distributed team – we can still offer consulting services over the holiday season.
Having said that, those with a pro-active attitude can save themselves some money, time and stress with some simple tips:
- Plan
- It sounds obvious but releasing code on at 5pm Christmas Eve is probably asking for trouble!
- Test
- Make sure you’re testing your code – from unit testing to load testing, the tools to help are available for a reason.
- Monitor
- Keeping an eye on your server is one thing, but if you don’t react then you could be in big trouble.
- Using a tool like FusionReactor ( http://www.fusion-reactor.com ) can help identify issues before they become a problem.
- FusionReactor has several features that can help you work pro-actively even when un-attended. Setting up good crash-protection settings can keep you alerted via email or even react to prevent your server failing in the first place.
- When all hope is lost…
- Sometimes, bad things happen. If your application server fails, you don’t want your users to have to wait 3 days for someone to restart a service. FusionReactor Enterprise edition has a feature called “Enterprise Scripting”. This lets you configure scripts to run when a service fails to respond within given parameters. For example, if your server is polled every 5seconds and fails to respond to 5 polls in a row, you may want to restart the service. What’s more, FusionReactor includes the scripts to do just that – even from a remote machine requiring authentication. Just look inside the <FusionReactor Installation Direction>\etc\cp\ folder where you’ll find a bunch of scripts for *nix and Windows environments along with a helpful Readme.txt – or you can refer to the online help.
- With prices starting from less than $0.50/day there’s no reason any server should be lonely without FusionReactor this holiday season!
Have a great holiday and we look forward to seeing you in 2011 with our new “jewel in the crown” to the Fusion product suite, FusionAnalytics!