DEV Community

Adriano Di Giovanni
Adriano Di Giovanni

Posted on

Do you monitor the activity of your third parties?

We all developers depend on third parties, service and software providers. They sometimes announce events such as deprecations and service shutdowns. Such events need your attention and a timely response.

Do you monitor the activity of your third parties? If so how?

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
xngwng profile image
Xing Wang

Two things I do:

  1. If purely for Status (online) we setup a unified status dashbaoard like this: (moesif.com/public-apis/status/dash), that I can monitor all the status of third party services at a glance.
  2. For deeper tracking of all the third party APIs and how they interact with each other, (I'll shamelessly mention our own product here), once integrated, Moesif (moesif.com) monitors all the third party APIs and analyse all the data together to give you the big picture.
Collapse
 
adigiovanni profile image
Adriano Di Giovanni

Thanks for your reply. You made me think about my own question.

My original intent was to investigate how we developers monitor announcements like this one:

Starting January 23, 2018, we will no longer support Google Mobile Ads (GMA) SDK versions lower than 7.0.0 for Android or iOS. To continue serving mobile ads from AdMob, Ad Exchange, or DFP after this date, please upgrade to the latest Google Mobile Ads SDK

This announcement was published on support.google.com/admob/release-n...

Collapse
 
xngwng profile image
Xing Wang

Well, yes. Moesif won't capture news announcements like that.

But if say an micro service or external service is upgraded (or if team for that micro service is doing continuous integration and new version is released automatically), and errors are caused by that, moesif actually will detect and attribute it correctly.

Sometimes the error caused by upgrade of micro service can be really subtle. For example, if you have a mesh of micro services that depends on each other, error at one location could actually be caused by another micro service that seemed to function fine.

Collapse
 
weswedding profile image
Weston Wedding

If they have a newsletter you can subscribe to like drupal.org/security or Unity's asset store update notifications I'll subscribe.

Otherwise I have so many different sets of 3rd parties across so many different types of projects that it is, unfortunately, not something I actively pursue.

Collapse
 
adigiovanni profile image
Adriano Di Giovanni

Thanks for your reply.
Did you ever find yourself in a rush to meet a deadline from one of your third parties?

Collapse
 
weswedding profile image
Weston Wedding

No, fortunately not. Generally speaking most of our client work is self contained and doesn't depend on 3rd party data sources or hosting approaches like Heroku. And when it has, it has been a short-lived project that was probably done by the time the problem hit.

Sometimes we make internal projects that might rely more heavily on third parties because those projects have budgets of $0 so the cheaper the better, and we just note that (for instance) our Google Trends display has started to act wonky and get around to fixing it sometime down the road.

Collapse
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

Changelogs and package managers honestly.