Elastic synthetics is an observability solution that we use to measure all kinds of things that we do here at Threatbear. Specifically we use it to monitor whether a service that we provide is available, and it lets us know if it isn’t available (or down in geekspeak).
If a system is available, by using Elastic observability, we can know how long a service has been available for as well as the qualitative aspects of the service we provide. For example we can get answers to questions such as “what is the 95th percentile of our latency in milliseconds” or “when does our staging certificate expire”.
These are very helpful internally, but how do you communicate and share this information publicly and with customers? If you’re already monitoring it using Elastic observability, why manage and pay for a separate statuspage application?
This was the problem I set out to solve when I created our status page and untintentionally (although I’ve very pleased with the outcome) created a public status page application that uses Elasticsearch as the main data store and Upstash redis as the caching layer.
Once I have setup the monitors in Elastic, I can simply tag a monitor to make it public and it will show up on our main page. Our customers can then see the availability data that we see - it is just a way to be transparent and provide helpful and meaningful information to customers who depend on our products and services!
This is another benefit of the Elastic ecosystem. Building systems and processes on an extensible data platform has enabled Threatbear to innovate (it’s a small innovation to be sure) and use our data to deliver utility and value where it is needed to our customers.
As part of our engineering process, I often like to think “How could this system be abused?!” or “what would it look like if this was attacked?” and end up attacking the very things that I build to make them more secure. If I’ve missed something, please reach out on our contact page