[VoiceOps] Plivo Offline, Domain Expired; Out of Business?

[Peter Beckman]

Yep, we monitor our vendors. In some cases, better than they monitor
themselves. It's frustrating that they don't/can't/won't, but wanting them
to change doesn't help our customer experience. So we do it for
them proactively.

Too many outages on our vendor services have been caused by their
ineptitude, such as this Plivo outage. We decided as a result of this Plivo
ouatge that, while it was only merely annoying to our Operations team and
didn't result in any customer-facing issues, we could have seen this coming
and maybe averted this disaster for everyone by adding two config lines in
our monitoring platform and a process to ensure notification to, followup
with and closure of the issue with Plivo.

The cost to our Operations team is small, the automated monitoring costs
nothing, but the impact of knowing that our vendors are having (or will
have) issues before they tell us or know themselves, AND before our
customers complain, improves our customer experience and operational
excellence despite our vendor's failings.

It also gives us a chance to write defensive code to handle the situations
where the vendor is not meeting their contractually obligated level of service.

Beckman


On Sun, 23 Apr 2017, Keln Taylor wrote:

> Just to clarify, you are saying that you monitor the domain and SSL cert of
> your vendors so you can notify them?
> That's cool.
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Keln Taylor
> 870-204-2121
> kelntaylor at gmail.com
>
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 12:31 PM, Peter Beckman <beckman at angryox.com> wrote:
>
>> We should all strive to NOT do that. We integrated a once a day check into
>> our Monitoring platform that starts warning Operations 30 days before the
>> domain expires, and actually pages people starting at 9am on Weekdays 7
>> days before if it hasn't been renewed. We had to tweak it for how our
>> registrar publishes that information, and we automated renewals so it
>> rarely goes off, but when it does we can get in front of it.
>>
>> We have the same thing in place for our public and internal SSL/TLS
>> Certificates.
>>
>> If you are running a business on the web and don't automate monitoring of
>> critical infrastructure, you get outages like this. Heck, we started
>> monitoring the domain and SSL certs of our critical-path dependent
>> services/vendors since another outage many years ago after an SSL cert
>> expired.
>>
>> Plivo wasn't in our mix, as they aren't critical-path, but they are now,
>> and they are still in alarm.  Operations now will be automatically notified
>> when we can actually see Plivo again.
>>
>> Beckman
>>
>> On Sun, 23 Apr 2017, Gavin Henry wrote:
>>
>> On 23 April 2017 at 17:31, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I've done it. Just got distracted, got to fiddling around and thinkin'
>>>> bout things, and before I know it, the domain's expired and I'm no longer
>>>> on the register of respectable party guests...
>>>>
>>>
>>> Embarrassing. I'm sure I'll do it at some point. :-)
>>>
>>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------------
>> Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
>> beckman at angryox.com
>> http://www.angryox.com/
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------------
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>

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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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