Part 49: Community Service Day to help small businesses

Today Forcepoint's Finland team had our Community Service Day, during which we do something good for our communities. Much of the team went for example to donate blood or do some outdoor activities, like helping to clean parks and beaches.

I decided to help one of our local businesses. Not giving out its name because that would immediately reveal where I live. Anyway, the business owners were totally impressed that someone would offer them support like this for free.

Like with any business in 2023, the operational status of their website is extremely important for them. I'm sure their website operator does have proper monitoring in place, but I offered to provide them my own 3rd party monitoring -- of course by using my What's up, home? Zabbix instance.

Setting up the monitoring

I have gone through the steps how to do this in my previous blog posts, so I'm not going to be super detailed in this. Basically I just 

• added a new web scenario which tests if their website is loading fine, test is done every 15 minutes for now
• added an alert trigger which goes to warning state after one failed attempt and sends out an alert after two failed attempts
• calculates daily SLA for the site

And, of course it works, this is Zabbix after all. 

What's next?

This is now just front page monitoring, but in case they would start to see frequent issues on any part of their site functionality, I'll then add additional tests.

What is this good for?

Apart from just providing surprise goodwill, this could be very handy for the business owners in case their website would have frequent problems or just a single prolonged downtime. If the web hosting company would claim that everything has been fine, I could help the business owners and provide data that proves otherwise: "see, according to own monitoring, things were not working at all between time period X to Y."

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and the Community Service Days are something I love.