Montreal Tech Watch

Delano Mandelbaum (@solutious) showcased Stella last tuesday at Montreal NewTech. It’s a new monitoring service which can track the uptime, response time, and potential server errors of a web service. If you have a website, a web application, a ecommerce store, or any server, Stella can measure response time once every 5 minutes. It also sends alert emails whenever there are problems, with SMS notifications coming soon.

Monitoring services like watchmouse, site24x7, pingdom and other free services like montastic already exist (since the dawn of the web), but given enough data, Stella shines with attractive status reports, like the one displayed below:

Report for the readon.ly service

Stella is also open source and monitoring data is freely available with different formats (csv, yml, json etc.) It’s a refreshing level of openess that differentiates stella from any other competing service.

Stella is branded as a service for developers, but it’s also an interesting tool for many managers and decision-makers, who would use the status reports when deciding which service to use. Managers in charge of operations and systems can also use the status reports to prove their department’s performance to executives, and that’s where Stella’s focus on usability and readibility wins points.

Stella is currently under beta, with interesting marketing. Delano is presented as an intern (scribe?) and there are other characters in the service’s presentation. There are well alive (on Twitter at least). The design is also unique, in what I can describe only as future/steampunk style, i.e. mixing late 19th century symbols and design with 21st century digital technology.

Check out Stella