Monitoring Third Party Vendors as an Ops Engineer/SRE
· 3 min read
Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops?
As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.
It's a no-brainer that you should know when such outages happen to be on top of things if/when it affects your running applications.
Most of your third party dependencies will have a public status page or a Twitter account where they publish updates on their outages. Here are some seemingly easy ways to monitor these pages
- Subscribe to the RSS feed of these pages
- Follow the Twitter account
- Sign up for Slack, Email, SMS notifications on the status page itself if the page supports these