Seeing Alertra's New Webhooks in Action

As we mentioned last week, Alertra has introduced powerful new webhook tools to help customers handle downtime. If you want to see the power of webhooks in action, you simply need to follow us on Twitter, where we are monitoring 50 of the most popular sites as a benchmark for the online community. Want to know when some of the biggest sites are going down and how quickly they get back up and running? Alertra is making that information readily available.

Who Is Alertra Watching?

Alertra picked 50 different sites to monitor including under-publicized (yet very popular) sites and start-ups that have quickly gained a large following. Some of the sites you'll find us tweeting about include:

• 5secondfilms.com
• Chartgirl.com
• Dp.la
• Eventbrite.com
• Feedly.com
• Goodnoows.com
• Mypermissions.org
• Narrative.ly
• Nowthisnews.com
• Pixlr.com
• Qz.com
• Rebelmouse.com
• Sigfig.com
• Soundcloud.com
• Theswizzle.com
• Thisismyjam.com
• Twit.tv
• Upworthy.com
• Weather.gov

How Does the Webhook Work?

When one of the 50 sites we are benchmarking comes back online after a period of downtime, Alertra triggers an OnUp event webhook. This webhook executes three consecutive API calls. Two of these calls are used to gather the uptime stats of the site and to interact with the Twitter API. The third call puts a pause on the monitoring of the site for a period of one hour since sites can come up and go back down frequently while issues are being resolved and we don't want to overwhelm Twitter with continuous updates about a site's problems when the problem is being actively resolved.

See a Webhook in Action

If you want to see a webhook in action, simply follow us on Twitter and you'll be notified when one of the sites that we monitor has experienced an outage. This will not only allow you to see our webhook in action, but it can give you a feel for what our webhooks can do for your site. If you want a webhook set up on your Alertra account, our support team will be happy to configure the webhooks you need to manage your site downtime effectively.