My rocket-obsessed 4-year-old was SO excited that mommy was “launching” Scout Labs last week. He kept asking me if I was going into space. Well, things were ‘getting off the ground’ I guess.
But I couldn’t help but notice on launch day how much it actually felt like Mission Control in the Scout Labs office. I thought I share with you some of the ways we monitored and directed launch day.
Of course, we were logged into our Scout Labs workspace, watching and responding to blogs, tweets, news and comments in real-time. We kept refreshing the page to see the newest posts of the minute, which was easy enough, as we were logged in all day long, but we definitely felt the need to have our aggregated search results available via RSS. (To those of you who have requested it, that is officially prioritized on our roadmap now). From the Scout Labs dashboard, we bookmarked Tweets and posts with tags like influencer, event, launch and feature_idea. We emailed and assigned things to each other, but there was also plenty of “Margaret, will you take that one?” and “Jenny, you on this one?” yelled across the room as well.
Another thing that we are all tuned in to (because it is projected on our wall to a size of about 15-feet square) is a streaming list of real-time searches by users inside our app. Every time a user hits “Save” on a search, we see the search terms requested, how many fractions of a second (or seconds, in a few cases) each search took us to return the data. You can imagine how fun this is to watch - people’s interests flickering on our wall in real-time, sometimes hundreds per minute.
We’ve got application metrics as well, with by account and totals for number of workspaces, users, invites sent, bookmarks created, sentiment values overridden, discussions started, etc. We’ve got back-end monitors for how long sentiment takes to process, how long it takes for features to populate and everything else you can imagine, all wired up to pagers so that we are immediately notified if something goes down or stops working. In fact, the only thing that was uneventful on launch day was our systems! No pagers. No lags. No problems. (OK, I lied. Apologies to Sean Power who was transferred to the SF fire department when Julie tried to transfer him to me! Thanks for calling back, Sean.)
It’s not quite as cool as sending a rocket to space, but a launch of any kind is an amazing thing to be a part of. Especially when you’ve got the right tools in place and a rock star team on the job.
Actually, that was quite funny, albeit disorientating :). You were, however, extremely forthcoming with your time. Alistair and I both appreciate it.