Olaf Alders

As you may know MetaCPAN as a project has no budget. We rarely solicit funds because we rarely need to pay for anything. This has allowed us to focus on the project itself rather than the administrative issues that arise whenever money changes hands. Because these relationships allow us the freedom to do what we need to do, we think it's important to thank our sponsors publicly.

And with that introduction I'd like to thank Panopta, the latest sponsor in the MetaCPAN world.

A while back I put out a call on Twitter to see about getting someone to sponsor a monitoring solution. Less than 30 minutes later, I got a response directly from Panopta. I started an email conversation and we had a sponsored account in no time.

Panopta is like other hosted monitoring solutions in that you can do ping (and other) checks of your services and you get email notifications when things go sideways. However, what we find really useful is that Panopta makes it trivial to install their agents on your servers as well. You can manage the internal checks that these local agents handle via the Panopta web interface. You then get the same level of notifications you would get for your external checks. So, you not only have a hosted monitoring service to check your public facing ports, but you can add checks for disk space, CPU and internal processes to your heart's content. This is not a knock against [insert your favourite open source monitoring solution here]. It's just that our stack is already pretty big and complicated and this allows us to take at least one layer out of it, for which we're very grateful.

The technical support I've asked for from Panopta has always been lightning fast and uptime has been amazing, so it has been working very well for us. I also appreciate their patience, since I've wanted to thank them publicly for some time now. :)

As an addendum, there are more sponsor acknowledgements coming. I've gotten behind on these and I'm posting them in chronological order. It's a good problem to have, though!