Better Uptime - Advanced Monitoring review

Dashboard and Child Feature Requests
1

Before you read, please note that I want to provide constructive feedback because I think MainWP has great potential but the developers are probably not doing maintenance. Therefore, what seems like a good idea on paper is far from being optimal in the real world.

So here I go…

I tested the Better Uptime integration and I do not really see the value in it.

  1. The plugin takes 10-15 seconds to simply display the data. Each time we reload the page, we have to wait again.

  2. On the hundreds of monitors we have, it seems like you only get 50. No way to get everything. Pagination is broken.

  3. The sites that are down are not displayed on top so I have to browse the list to see what is down. To me, the goal of the plugin is to see what is down. I don’t really care if it is up. The focus should be on telling me what the problems are so I can fix them.

  4. Not all status are handled. For instance, we had a site that was in “Validating recovery” status and there was simply no status in MainWP (it seems like you handle only UP or DOWN).

What I would expect:

  1. Get a widget in the Dashboard overview displaying all sites that are DOWN.

  2. When I’m the Dashboard overview, there should be AJAX calls made to display the new down sites (and remove the ones that are now UP) without me having to refresh the window. That way, I have a view that is always “up to date”.

  3. Handle webhook so an email can be sent automatically to the clients to notify them that their site is down.

  4. Being able to set as many monitor per site and as many emails as I want to notify clients.

I would say the new version is not a “beta” but more a proof of concept that a connection can be made between Better Uptime and MainWP. The only value is see is that I don’t have to go on BetterUptime.com to add a new monitor.

I would suggest that, when you plan a new feature, you display what you plan on doing and how. That way, we could tell you if it is going to help us or not. When you release this as “beta”, it’s too late.

I see so much potential in MainWP but there are so many things that are not efficient. Let me know how can I help. We are actively developing plugins to make it better because the current tools are not what they could be. If we work together, MainWP could be a lot better.

Best regards.

2

I too was very pleased to see the integration with BetterUptime, so thank you for this. I agree with all the comments above for @maximejobin plus have the additional comments below:-

Recent Events
Sorting for the ‘Started At’ column only seems to use the number and not the fact that some of the entries are days, weeks or hours. So you cannot see the most recent events as they will be ‘masked’ by seemingly newer events.

image
image755×583 17.4 KB

Number of Events Displayed
I only ever seem to get a maximum of 10 events displayed, even with I select ‘Shows 25 Entries’ and have hundreds of Events within BetterUptime.

So overall a great start with BetterUptime, as a Beta. I look forward to the next release addressing the concerns raised.

I agree 100% on asking users what functionality a Plugin should have before development starts, especially if it’s a product where you are not familiar with all of the features and nuances.

1 Like