We are happy to announce our new application, called AlertGrid.

The motivation to create this online app arose whilst we were working on another project (an online invoicing tool). We realized that there is some very important logic being executed behind the scenes, in the form of a scheduled task, and at the point of any failure it just stops working, without any trace. Such a silent fail can be very hard to detect in the production environment and usually cannot be simulated in a test environment. So the silent fail can quickly evolve into a really loud, epic fail, with your customers calling you and sharing their (probably not so good) opinions about your broken system.

This lack of information appeared to be a problem not only for that particular app but also to nearly all the other projects we were taking part in. In business, ignorance ain’t bliss. We started to pay more attention to failures of our own service providers (e.g. we noticed that sometimes our code repository stops sending emails and the outage can last for quite a long time).

The first thing to do was to find a working solution for our problem. There already exist some of course, but… they were not affordable or way too complicated for us.

And so, the brilliant idea was born:

“Let’s create a simple web application, that will notify us about failures in our application before angry customers do that!”

That was the beginning. The design was polished during the fascinating development process. We used our experience from a previous project, where we had worked on an “enterprise” system designed to manage event escalation and notification in an IT environment for a large bank. This time, we aimed to create something easy to use, robust and affordable, something that would use the simplest integration patterns possible yet still deliver 90% of the functionality of that big, heavy banking solution.

At the moment we are at the very end of the ‘v1.0′ development process. We’ve learned a lot during this process and we promise to share all this knowledge with you. Currently, the project is under heavy testing which is yielding a lot of interesting feedback.  So far it seems that our idea is quite unique as we couldn’t find anything similar and – at the same time – so simple.

So if you are a:

• business owner (not necessarily IT) caring about customer satisfaction
• software vendor caring about the reliability of your products
• software developer who wants to improve his/her code
• system administrator tired of complicated integration and component management
• person interested in reliability, monitoring, or simply nice, innovative, smart web apps

we recommend you to stay tuned to this blog!