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December 2021 Product Updates

Hello and happy December from Metrist!

December has been a big month for Metrist not only in terms of what we have been working on, but also the fact that we saw a number of outages across the main infrastructure providers. We are happy to report that we identified the AWS and Azure outages that occurred during the week of December 12, 2021 a full hour (in some cases multiple hours) prior to when AWS and Azure updated their status pages. Thanks to those of you who reached out to tell us your stories about how Metrist helped you during these times, we love to hear from you. The team has been hard at work with some big product updates. Check them out below and please don’t hesitate to reply with any feedback or questions that you might have:

Improved web app navigation and data discovery

Being alerted that something is degraded or down is disruptive. At Metrist our goal is getting you the information you need as quickly as possible. You’ll notice multiple updates in the web app, all of these align with this goal.

Metrist web app home page

New filters: By default we now display only the service monitors that are degraded or experiencing an outage. We’ll display all service monitors if everything is healthy. This helps you focus on the most important information first. You can select from a number of filters on the page to narrow down and view the service monitors that are important to you.

Screenshot of the main page in the Metrist web app, showing a grid of products from AWS and Azure, all with icons that indicate they are healthy.

Service Monitor details page

In addition we have updated the details on the service monitor details page to show a quick glance spark line within each check. This provides you with the context around whether an issue just started or if a check has been acting up and slowing down over time.

A screenshot of a Metrist web page that shows the status of AWS S3 across different regions and functionalities.

Realtime Data Experience

View data as it’s received by the Metrist collector to understand in real time if a specific check or region is performing as expected.

A screenshot of a Metrist web app page that shows a timeline of recent attempts to test a variety of services, with columns for the time, the service monitor name, the region, the time it took to test the functionality, and what functionality was checked.

Errors Experience

Metrist now captures the stack traces relating to errors that are triggered across the services we monitor.

A screenshot from the Metrist web app showing a page that lists recent errors observed when Metrist checked the functionality of a few different services.

Where can I view data on the errors and realtime views in the Metrist web app?

The errors and realtime views are available for all service monitors or an individual monitor.

To view for all service monitors that you are subscribed to, select the “More” drop down menu on the homepage:

To view errors or realtime pages for a specific monitor, first select the service monitor that you’d like to view data for. Once you have selected the service monitor from the service monitor details page select either the “Errors” or “Realtime data” items from the sub menu.

Next time you are curious about the status of a 3rd party make sure to log in to the Metrist web app and let us know if it helps identify or troubleshoot any issues: https://app.metrist.io

Rebranded Slack and Teams with the new name

The Slack and Teams apps have been updated to display Metrist vs Canary.

A screenshot from Slack showing Metrist Slack bot messages about AWS S3, SQS, and EC2 outages.

You can still use the existing Slack and Teams commands to view additional details about your Metrist monitors in the Slack and Teams apps.

A screenshot that lists the different commands that the Metrist Slack bot responds to, all beginning with /metrist

New service monitors: AWS RDS and AWS ECS

We released two additional AWS service monitors to keep track of the availability of AWS RDS (MySQL) and ECS (Fargate). These service monitors are available to add to your account by selecting “Manage” from the Metrist web app homepage.

A screenshot from the Metrist web app showing the 8 different AWS services that Metrist monitors.

What we are working on next

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a candy cane! So, how about a view into what we are working on next:

  • Simplified service monitor threshold configurations – Allows you further control around when a monitor or check are degraded.
  • AWS Monitors – Adding some additional AWS monitors to monitor beyond the infrastructure.
  • GCP Service Monitors – Adding more GCP monitoring to expand our visibility into the GCP platform.
  • Public Beta Launch – Soon Metrist will be available for anybody to sign up. If you are interested in providing a quote about Metrist as an early user, let us know. There is a chance that we will feature your quote on our new website.

That’s all for now! Please let us know what you think of these new features, let us know what other features you’d like to see.

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