Customer support as product development – disabling auto scaling server monitoring

Back in January we released a feature which uses a server’s hostname as a unique key, in addition to the agent key. This allows you to install the Server Density monitoring agent on a single server, create an image and then when you deploy new instances of that image we’ll detect the new server from the hostname and start monitoring automatically. This lets you create a template server with alerts and settings that can be copied to other servers automatically, and it works well for many of our customers, particularly those using Amazon EC2.

However, 2nd servers appearing has resulted in many support requests asking what is going on. It is our single most requested support issue. We assumed that hostnames should never change in production, and we still believe that is the case. But it happens regardless, and it results in confusion when it does happen.

So as of today there is now a switch to enable and disable this feature on a per server basis. We don’t like adding options and settings because it creates more complexity but in this case, given the number of support requests we receive, we thought it was time to fix the problem by default.

All current existing servers will remain with the feature enabled. This ensures that previously known functionality continues to operate in the same way. But new servers will have this disabled by default, and you can disable it for any of your servers by editing them in Server Density. We’ve also updated our documentation to make it clearer how this works.

Because all our developers handle support requests, we know the pain points and are able to solve them directly by code. I think this is a great example of product development through customer support.