Monitoring service that has a human component?

Wed Dec 5 22:12:41 UTC 2018

> On Dec 5, 2018, at 5:01 PM, David H <ispcolohost at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey all, was curious if anyone knows of a website monitoring service that has the option to incorporate a human component into the decision and escalation tree?  I’m trying to help a customer find a way around false positives bogging down their NOC staff, by having a human determine the difference between a real error, desired (but different) content, or something in between like “Hey it’s 3am and we’ve taken our website offline for maintenance, we’ll be back up by 6am.”  Automated systems tend to only know if test A, or steps A through C, are failing, then this is ‘down’ and do my preconfigured thing, but that ends up needlessly taking NOC time if the customer themselves is performing work on their own site, or just changed it and whatever content was being watched, is now gone.  So, the goal would be to have the end user be the first point of contact if it looks like more of a customer-side issue.  If they can’t be reached to confirm, THEN contact NOC, and unlike email alerts, keep contacting until a human acknowledges receipt of the alert.

I know there are outsourced NOC services you can hire.  I’m not sure how long it would take, but I wonder if you could do an API call to something like mechanical turk as well?

- Jared