Newswire

Introduction

Newswire is a PR and marketing cloud company that helps businesses gain exposure through distributing news and announcements to major media outlets. Their distribution network includes premium news outlets, over 1.6 million journalist contacts, and a cloud-based influencer platform that provides access to social media influencers.

Newswire gives companies a place to centralize communications with a branded newsroom encompassing blog posts, social media and press releases. These beautifully designed pages provide media contacts access to vast amounts of information with minimal research.

Newswire Needed More Coverage for Their Network

With such a large distribution network, Newswire needed multiple monitoring tests to ensure server availability. Their former monitoring provider offered a limited number of tests per month.

Before switching to Uptime.com, testing limitations meant that Newswire was unwillingly neglecting their web infrastructure monitoring. These gaps in coverage pushed their IT team to seek out additional monitoring solutions.

The Newswire team was thrilled to discover Uptime.com provided checks to cover all of their monitoring needs.

Reliability was a Critical Requirement for Newswire

In addition to needing a full service solution, Newswire needed a reliable monitoring solution.

Newswire utilizes 12 checks ranging from monitoring uptime to transaction checks for client sign up, login and shopping cart. Within the last year, Uptime.com notified Newswire of 60 different website outages; five instances of login issues caught by the transaction check, and nine when an ICMP check detected server accessibility and packet loss.

"Reliability is a key requirement for us, especially a low rate of false positives. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night with a notification that our website is down when everything is working fine," says Newswire Tech Lead Jonathan Pike.

Newswire customers have the ability to upload images and videos with their press releases; consequently, Newswire servers must always be available to host these assets. When a distributor includes images and/or video on their site, the media is served directly from Newswire's servers. If servers are down, the media won't be available on distributor sites.

Setup was Simple

Newswire found the Uptime.com account setup simple. Without a single call to support, the organization was able to configure monitoring checks for their entire infrastructure. They created a simple escalation process that sent emails first, and then SMS messages for problems that continued after 10 minutes.

"We use internal monitoring to make sure our servers can talk to each other, but we use Uptime to make sure those servers can connect to the internet. It's no good for our servers to be able to work with each other but not communicate outside our network," says Pike.

By partnering with Uptime, Newswire has a reliable monitoring solution that provides 24/7 coverage for their entire network.

"Reliability is a key requirement for us, especially a low rate of false positives. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night with a notification that our website is down when everything is working fine. Uptime.com gives us that piece of mind." -Johnathan Pike, Senior Software Developer for Newswire