Shutting down Observ.io

We had a vision for a tool that monitored your website from around the world, and we called it Observ.io. It’s got a super cute logo.

Our goal was to leverage our global network to provide detailed information on website availability and performance. Our first step was to define the characteristics that describe a working website, and set up monitors to track them Once the monitors detected a problem, diagnostic tools would activate and start collecting data to aid troubleshooting. Website unavailable in part of the world? Immediately start collecting DNS information, traceroutes, etc.

Unfortunately, monitoring is a hard problem, and monitoring tools are virtually worthless unless they’re fantastic. Missed outages erode trust almost as fast as false alarms, and when your monitoring network includes over 250 servers in 90 countries, you're going to have some false alarms. Because of the direction we were taking the tool (global monitoring) our prime customers were going to be enterprise users, who have even higher standards.

Upon review our team simply isn’t big enough to execute on such an ambitious project. There’s a tremendous amount of work in front of us to get to the point where we could start accepting money for the product, and it’s not clear we could ever work fast enough to tread water in the competitive monitoring marketplace.

So we’re shutting Observ.io down. June 30th will be its last day, after which we will delete all customer data and concentrate our efforts on making WonderProxy the go-to solution for testing localized web applications.