Jesse Robbins has a nice post over at O´Reilly Radar called “Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)”. It’s an interesting piece on how to plan effectively for operations when launching a startup.
His basic thesis is that most startups think of operations as something boring and because of this spend too little time on it in the initial phase, which can easily come back and bite you later in the process.
Jesse gives some examples of software and what you need to get started. Our view is of course to go for a complete and ready-made service for monitoring instead of wasting hours to install and configure a software solution for that purpose. This way you also get external monitoring which is important if your network goes down and the added bonus is that you don’t have to put up any cash for buying a server to install the monitoring software on.
Anyway, it’s a good read. Get the “secret sauce” here.