You never want to hear that your site has fallen over, but when you work for the Philadelphia Police Department’s website, you really don’t want to get that call. That's why Lloyd Emelle from Hyaline Creative relies on Dawn™ .
"The main reason I was in the market for a monitoring service was because we'd receive an error usually due to a third-party [such as YouTube or Google Maps] error, and it would take the whole page down, and I wouldn't find out until someone from the police department would call me saying "hey, this page is down". If they're seeing it just then, there’s no telling how long it's been down.
"[now] I can catch it before hundreds or thousands of other people catch it. Especially when you're throwing in third party services, you need to be able to know when things go down. We're a city with a population of over one and a half million, and the police department need to be able to communicate in the language of 2010. Our 'Web 2.0' approach to public safety enables the citizens of Philadelphia to quickly find the information they need, and communicate with the department from any web browser. This means the web site must be up 24/7 and if it goes down, it must be fixed right away."
Since the Philly Police site is built using the SilverStripe CMS, it made sense to use Dawn for monitoring, as Dawn was developed with SilverStripe in mind. If there is a fault within SilverStripe code, Dawn is able to identify the nature of the problem and give a precise description, where other monitoring systems would come up with a more generic message such as "Website is not behaving as expected".
Installing Dawn was an easy task for Lloyd.
"I was surprised I didn't have to do any coding to get it to work, and I was very impressed by the installation process. Hats off to you guys for getting that right the first time around. It works. It took about five or six minutes to get installed."
Lloyd has also been impressed with the range of coverage that Dawn offers. "Page generation timing, it monitors the web server, it monitors the SQL database - extra treats! I never had any interest in knowing that type of information but it's actually pretty useful."
As Dawn is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), it is a lot easier for Lloyd to maintain.
"If we were to build something like [Dawn], we'd be spending twice as much as we spend per month to pay a developer per hour to develop a system to monitor our web resources, and then we’d have to host that, but since Dawn is SaaS we don’t have to worry about it. All the information that we need is there and Dawn keeps a history of all the errors. We don't have to worry about the storage and things like that. It’s a good thing all around."
A major benefit that Dawn offers Lloyd is that it runs on a separate server to the Philly Police website. A monitoring system run on the police server would reduce performance, and if the web server were to go down completely, it might not be able to alert Lloyd.
He also rates the user-friendly nature of the reporting side of Dawn, which means his web designers can assess the health of the site at any time.
"The interface is awesome. Anyone can log on and use it."
With Dawn watching over the website, Lloyd can rest easy knowing the police won’t be banging down his door.