Fewer things are more frustrating than learning–from customers or senior mangement–that your web site or service is “down” when you did not know it. It invalidates all the reporting you’ve done in the past about “uptime” and calls your competence into question.

When a company is expanding rapidly…or a new service is being launched, people understand there can be some hiccups, but they need to know your and your company are working to fix the problems. When you can say, “yes, we are aware of that and addressing it right now,” or “we had a problem for 15 minutes last night at 3:15am and took the following steps…” it boosts your personal credibility and the credibility of your company. It’s not just “covering yourself;” it’s part of the nature of rapid growth and uncertainty. You cannot eliminate risk, but how you mange it demonstrates what customers can expect from you in the future.

So, if you just have ping monitors set up that tell you all your servers are pingable from another machine on the local network–and then email you an alert if somethings goes down…ask the following questions: