Bringing Coherence to Canary.io

Last week I announced a rough preview of canary.io via a simple gist. The document helped explain the core goals of the project and demonstrated how to interact with the API.

I was very pleased at the enthusiastic community reaction - it was a bit of a dice roll to announce in this manner. Soon after the announcement, local hacker Jeremy Green built a demonstration of a dashboard (preview it live here) and Rick Yoesting started working on Hubot integration. Three days later, I gave a lightning talk at Monitorama in Portland and received even more positive feedback. It’s nice to see some small validation of our approach, and it is humbling that so many are willing to contribute to the cause.

Brandon and I are now engaging in the process of productionization and productization, aiming to make the various components more operable and the resultant system more comprehensible. Our initial approach will be to take care of the obvious: refactor the code, put up something resembling a real web page, start a mailing list, etc. You can follow along via the previously linked GitHub issues.

After we complete this, we’ll be making a serious run at increasing the usability of the existing network, helping you make better use of it and expanding its capabilities. We are absolutely committed to our initial slogan, Open Monitoring for the Open Web, and thank you all for helping us get a little closer each day.