Tickbeat BlogNo news is good news, right?http://www.tickbeat.com/blog2015-11-25T00:00:00+00:00www.tickbeat.comPower cuts and notificationshttp://www.tickbeat.com/blog/2015/11/25/power-cuts-notifications/2015-11-25T00:00:00+00:002018-10-09T15:55:03+00:00www.tickbeat.com<p>We are lucky enough to have a swanky new fridge/freezer at home. It has an alarm to let you know if the
door is left open. The alarm also sounds if the temperature rises above a set value.</p>
<p>The purpose of both alarms is obvious. The temperature alarm could trigger due to a failure, or because
an unusually large amount of warm stuff has just been put inside. But if there were a power cut, we certainly
wouldn't find out from the fridge. The exact failure that takes out the system would take out the notifications,
too.</p>
<p>If your Tickbeat instance itself is subject to a power failure or other outage, it'll go down, just like a fridge.
But, since Tickbeat is all about glancing at a single indicator to check everything's good, you'll find out - and
the same applies to any of the unlimited number of subsystems that your beats and subsidiary Tickbeats are
watching out for. Fail safe, as it were.</p>
Doing business by emailhttp://www.tickbeat.com/blog/2015/07/12/doing-business-by-email/2015-07-12T00:00:00+00:002018-10-09T15:55:03+00:00www.tickbeat.com<p>Would you lose business if prospects couldn’t reach you by email?
When was the last time you checked where sales@your-company.com actually ends up, that somebody
was reading the messages and responding to them? It’s not unknown for company inboxes like
sales@ or info@ to fill up with spam, and start to return "mailbox full" to real enquiries. If
the sales inbox is usually quiet but occasionally receives a big deal or enquiry "out of the blue",
it’s particularly vulnerable to this type of outage.</p>
<p>Since you can tick a beat with just a click of the mouse, you can ensure business critical inboxes
stay "alive" really easily. Arrange for a message containing a "tick link" to be sent in automatically
every so often (say, once a week). Tickbeat won’t forget: it’ll be expecting those messages and your
beat will miss if someone isn’t clicking the links.</p>
<p>This is better than fully-automated testing because you know that a person has clicked the link -
and that means the email got to somebody’s eyeballs, at least. Confirmation of delivery isn’t the
same as confirmation that your email’s reaching the right person. It’s better than notify-on-fail
because notify-on-fail is reliant on the same system that’s under test (i.e. your email). If you’re
worried about the reliability of the process sending the automatic emails, well, Tickbeat can’t help
but it’ll certainly notice the absence of ticks.</p>