Tracking the Twitter DoS with a Cloud Gateway

Back in June I wrote that Twitter Search is a useful tool to gather real-time information about services which are being DoS'ed (Register.com's DNS servers at that time were being DoS'ed).

But what if Twitter itself is DoS'ed? I was just using the Vordel Gateway Cloud Edition to monitor Twitter via the Twitter API. And the Real-Time Monitoring showed that Twitter was down (you can see the Failed messages being picked up by the Vordel Gateway in the screenshot below, with an example of a failed Twitter routing red spike on the right). Twitter then came back up, and you can see the rise of green successful requests to Twitter, after that last red failed routing spike. This shows how a Cloud Gateway can monitor the status of Cloud Services, and allows you to take action accordingly (e.g. the Cloud Gateway can use its most recent cache).



Although Twitter would not be anyone's example of a "mission critical service" (and the lack of Twitter may actually mean increased productivity for many organizations), it is important to monitor Cloud services for uptime in order to find out proactively about service outages. Check out this other example from earlier this week - Monitoring SalesForce.com outage information on your Blackberry.