But you think they care about how much their javascript files changed?
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Lots of value here for me. Iād certainly pay for something like this.
Then on the dashboard page the user would see a graph of this value over
time, and could setup alerts for high or low values (or specific string
matches for status-like properties).
I like this. Thereās a bunch of things (not uptime-related) I would like to monitor with fancy graphs so I can show them to people. Doing this myself would mean searching for the perfect JavaScript Graph library, writing a script that does the monitoring, etc. And Iām not a sysadmin type of person, so Iād be googling/learning all this from scratch and fiddling with it until it works. Iām more or less a junior developer who is busy coding their actual web application.
Iād just like to say thatā¦ thereās potential in reaching people who are clueless, but for that, you need to educate them. I suspect that itās pretty unlikely for them to find their way onto your blog because they wouldnāt be searching for monitoring. These are probably more likeā¦ the people whose misconfigured CMS sites get hacked - so one place where to pick up your customers seems to be wherever they go when they got hacked and are now looking for a solution that mitigates their risks.
If you do want to appeal to āpeople who are clueless about monitoring and currently donāt do itā, I think it would be a good idea to write about the problems these people face: how running any kind of software is at least to some degree a risk - considering hacking or crashes (your customers make an effort to configure their servers right, or theyāre using reputable service providers but they simply canāt do anything about vulnerabilities of the systems they use, thereās never a 100% guarantee). While being hacked isnāt an overly huge problem for many sites - as long as itās discovered quickly and fixed - itās still something that can damage their reputation and profits. Conclude with a step-by-step guide how to set up your service in a way that theyāll know immediately that they got hacked and can take action. Simplicity is key.
For the non-technical people, the value is as much in the free education as in the service itself, really. And I do agree that that value is very likely more than what you currently charge.
I signed up to try the service, but now Iām logged out and canāt log back in. Also, the form for setting up monitoring looked a bit off - some of the fields were all left, while the others were more on the right. The monitoring itself seemed to be working, though. Also, the text on the page where I created the monitoring service said something about a text search field but that field wasnāt there - or I just couldnāt figure out which of the fields it was (maybe itās available in the paid version?).
Donāt let that discourage you - on the contrary, I think thereās potential. Actually, I do consider using your monitoring service for my site - Iām currently not using monitoring yet, but I know I should.
Hi @grumpi, thanks for your reply!
The āIām locked outā issue seems to be common and Iām working to fix it. The root cause is that the activation e-mail seems to always end on the junk mail folder, but the problem is that the process is not clear enough and Iām not giving any related error message when you try to login with a non-confirmed account.
Have a look at your junk mail / spam folder for our email and let me know if following the provided link fixes the issue. Alternatively drop me an e-mail at info [at] datasnitch.co.uk with your username and Iāll confirm your account.
As per your suggestions: Youāve got some nice ideas there. Iāve been really motivated by all you leaving comments here and started working with a developer to tackle the many issues identified on my site/application. Heās just now working on a security stuff I didnāt like at all (basically the passwords were being stored encrypted, which is not a good idea as we should just store a salted hash of the passwords). After that I want to work on the UX: Error messages, sign up process, etc. and finally a revamp of both the public pages and specially the control panel, where Iāll take the āmake it simpleā suggestions. Iām working on mock ups and might include a simple and an advanced differentiated dashboards for different types of users.
Of course, all this will almost force me to change my pricing/plans, but all current pro users will benefit from the change.
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The root cause is that the activation e-mail seems to always end on the
junk mail folder, but the problem is that the process is not clear
enough and Iām not giving any related error message when you try to
login with a non-confirmed account.
Yep, that fixed it. It was indeed a problem with the spam folder. The email didnāt even make it to the āadvertisingā tab, it really went to āspamā on gmail - I canāt say for sure why exactly, but changing the mail server to something reputable might help - also, changing the subject line to something more descriptive canāt hurt, like āWelcome to DataSnitch - Your New Account Is Readyā, or something like that. Changing the sender to something more recognizable (the sender currently just plain displays as āinfoā for me) would be good, too.
Any case, good luck, itās basically just a matter of fixing all the little things step by step (Iām currently doing just the same thing on my own application using the feedback of my early adopters, so I know how it can seem like an endless list of things to fix. 
).
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Nice service! It does indeed confirm Iāve got a few issues. Iāll work now on those.
Thank you!!
That was my thinking too.
I was dreaming about āDashboard as a Serviceā.
Then I had a moment of (bootstrapping) sobriety, and got two insights:
A. People who canāt build their own dashboard, but know they need it ā¦ how many there are of them?
(This one is actually similar to Pedroās āclueless people who need monitoringā.)
I realized that such people are a tiny layer between people who are totally non-tech (and hence do not know they may need a dashboard to track their service), and people who are able to build their own dashboard in a few hours of coding (and enjoy it).
How many of those small group I realistically can convert? That did not seem promising.
B. This is not a Dashboard-as-a-Service, but Graph-as-a-Service.
This is what you just said ā āshow (the graphs) to peopleā. Showing means embed into the public side of the site. Suddenly, instead of 3-5 admin users, the service could be exposed to hundreds (or thousands, who knows).
I realized I will have to design the caching, and master-slave replication, and smart routing, and dynamic allocation of VPS, ā¦ into the version 1 ā and I was not ready for that. I was hoping my version 1 will be happily running in a single VPS on a single instance of Postgres, in a true bootstrap spirit.
ā¦
I keep the domain though. May be I will re-visit the idea, but my copy will not talk about uptime monitoring. I would not want to be compared with Pingdoms of this world. I would write about dashboards and control centers, and such. May be I would even offer a hosted versionā¦ enterprises are heterogenous, and it is hard to monitor everything in one place.
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I agree with your insights below, but at the same time it sounds a lot like what https://www.geckoboard.com actually is doing with some success, it seems ā¦ so I think the market for such a thing is there. Maybe with the right focus on educating the potential users on the benefits of a good business dashboard, it might still be a viable bootstrapped service!