Rebuilding the Experience

Alertra is built on industry-leading, cutting edge technologies. We understand that when it comes to downtime, seconds count. Alertra's time-tested mechanism is built to detect outages before your customers do. We want to give you the world's easiest, fastest monitoring service.

Unfortunately, our admin interface falls well short of that goal. It's been plagued with usability and speed issues that certainly don't reflect the company mantra. That's why we started from scratch and built a brand new user experience. And we want to share with you what we did and why we did it. The new interface is currently in beta, and can be accessed at the following URL:

https://app-beta.alertra.com

We'd love to hear what you think of it and how it's helping your productivity!

So, What Was Wrong with the Old UI?

The current (as of this writing) version of the Alertra admin UI has a lot of issues. The first issue is that it's built on an unscalable infrastructure. The admin application was constructed using Ruby on Rails, and was outdated even by the time it launched.

Second, the UI was not designed with you in mind. We've gotten a lot of feedback over the past couple of years about what information is useful and which parts of the app are accessed the most.

Finally, the old UI isn't adaptable. As we add new features and capabilities, they have to be squeezed into a UI that doesn't use screen real estate effectively and doesn't have a clear method of organization. And since the application was constructed to run synchronously, we couldn't add things like real-time status updates. That's just not cool.

The New Hotness

Here's a brief rundown of some of the things we used to build the new app:

AngularJS (https://angularjs.org/)
Angular is an MVVM (or MVW, as AngularJS likes to call it) framework made for getting things done.

Bootstrap (http://getbootstrap.com)
Bootstrap is our CSS framework of choice. It's a great place to start.

Yeoman Application Scaffolding (http://yeoman.io/)
Yeoman just makes life easier. Application generators take care of all the boilerplate code and let you dig into building your app.

The new application is built entirely on Alertra's incredibly robust API. You can read about that here: http://www.alertra.com/features/api/

Finally, we keep all the application code in a repository on GitHub, and use Dploy.io to manage code deployments.

Why It's Better

This new setup allows us to rapidly develop new features, fix bugs, and maintain stability. The new UI is orders of magnitude faster than the old. Give it a try! You'll see exactly what we mean. We also believe we've stuck the information that matters most right in front of you, and made it much easier to get to everything in general.

What's Next?

Well, we want to hear from you. We're always looking to improve, and we know we can always do better. What do you want to see? What features would you use the most? What features do you never use? Leave us a comment below, or send a support request with your comments!