Ever been on the bad end of a Netflix outage? Losing the streaming services in the midst of movie night--or worse, on date night--can have disastrous repercussions for not just an entire evening, but for an entire website. Get enough of them together in a short enough span of time and canceled memberships and lost revenue follow. But VictorOps is looking to turn that around for a lot of companies by offering a way to get back on track, quickly.
VictorOps, which recently got in on a round of funding that netted the company $1.58 million, is currently seeking alpha testers for its new product, a software platform that can provide more information about a system crash and get that information back to those responsible for keeping the site up and running, the kind of information that's vital to the long-term and the short-term health of any website.
Specifics about the VictorOps system are a bit short on the ground right now, however, as the company is not only still in the earliest stages of developing said software, it’s also keeping what information it actually has very close to the vest. But one thing it did let slip is that this particular platform is going to be especially geared toward mobile devices, which formerly couldn't provide all the necessary functions to be useful in outage-related emergencies. Earlier information suggests that the plan is currently three-fold: it wants alpha customers identified by April and testing by June, with a beta test by September followed by actual incoming revenue generated by the end of this year.
This is actually leading some to wonder if the VictorOps system might not focus on a WebRTC-style function, allowing not only better communication, but active participation via file transfers and the like. Such a platform would allow those users involved in site maintenance to ring in from where ever they happen to be, the kind of flexibility that anyone running a major website like Netflix would dream of having on hand. It may well be the kind of thing that will let those operations teams get easy access to communications channels at unusual hours, but what it actually is, only time will tell. The possibilities inherent in such a system are almost dizzying in scope, but whether execution can match up with the idea, that's what's going to make the VictorOps release one to watch very closely.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
