From studio to Kittiewake monitoring
When we opened Kittiewake in the autumn, the plan was plain: identities, labels and small, fast websites for cafés and small shops. The posts below this one are from that time, and they still say what we believe about making things for small businesses.
A tool we wrote for ourselves
Small sites live on small servers, and small servers fail quietly. A disk fills up with old backups, a certificate runs out on a Sunday, a database stops after an update, and nobody notices until a customer writes. We looked after a handful of our clients' servers, so in September Elias wrote a small agent to report how each one was doing, and Noor drew a dashboard to show them all on one screen.
It was meant to be ours. Then Kelder Coffee asked whether they could see it too, and Linden & Loose wanted the same alerts for their shop. Within a few weeks the dashboard was what people wrote to us about, not the sites.
The best thing anyone can say about a monitoring tool is that they forgot it was there until the one night it mattered.
What changes
In October we stopped taking studio projects and finished the ones we had. Kittiewake is now a monitoring service for small servers: an agent for server health, checks from 24 cities, alerts that let you sleep, and a public status page for your customers. It is in open beta, by invitation, and free while the beta lasts.
We are keeping what made the studio work: a small team you can write to, plain words instead of jargon, and doing a few things well. The same three people answer your email, and Riia now sets up each new team herself.
What stays
The journal stays, and so do the old posts. We will write here about what we learn: why most alerts are noise, how to read a disk that is filling up, what a status page should say when things go wrong. If you would like to try Kittiewake on your own servers, write to hello@kittiewake.com and we will set you up.
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