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Know When Your Server Will Fail Before it Actually Happens

Image credit: BreadwigWhen your server goes down, it’s bad enough –even worse if you have to keep on trying to reach support in vain, then if you finally get through, you’ll have to convince them there’s trouble.  If you have such a host, run! (and I can even tell you where to).  So whenever I ran into trouble with online services, I feel relieved to see the auto-email saying support got notified.  At least they know!

But what if you know when your server will fail before it actually happens? I’ve just had an accidental peek into as-yet-unreleased technology:  today’s Zoho Blog post about Customer Support Community linked to another post, which simply did not load. Oops – the URL was in error, it pointed to an internal site, something like predict.zohocorp.longmumbojumbo.etc.  I got excited: can they predict future lottery numbers?  The World Cup results? (referee errors aside…)

I quickly asked Zoho what it was all about: it’s their predictive monitoring technology, which crunches a lot of data, is already delivering lightning fast notifications of failures after the fact, and also predictions – for now with false positives.  They certainly have to keep on tuning the technology, but it’s reassuring they are working on it.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve)