How Admin Labs built trusted monitoring on cloud reliability

Admin Labs was originally founded in 2016. Three years later, Multim acquired the majority of the company as they continue to expand their existing product portfolio. Currently, Admin Labs provides services to companies and organizations of all types and sizes all over the world. Our two main solution areas are monitoring and status pages. Both of which are of course strongly integrated with each other.

With the Admin Labs solutions for monitoring and status pages, you can keep yourself and your stakeholders informed about the status of all your services, at all times. Awareness, immediate reactivity, and complete transparency made possible by Admin Labs make sure you and your company always look like true professionals.

Previous challenges

Our main requirement for server infrastructure is high uptime. Our customers depend on Admin Labs to constantly monitor and report about downtime and other issues their systems might be having. Therefore, downtime in our own service is not an option. Furthermore, as most of our customers are outside Finland and Europe, it is absolutely imperative to have monitoring infrastructure in place in a wide variety of locations. UpCloud enables us to easily control and develop our infrastructure, even though distributed around the globe.

Unsurprisingly, due to the nature of our services, we need superior reliability and transparency from our partners. UpCloud guarantees that for us. They have been a significant part of our journey from the beginning. We plan to further expand our use of their infrastructure as new datacenters around the globe become available.

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Hosting on UpCloud

At Admin Labs, we use UpCloud instances for monitoring our customer systems and services. A single monitoring instance typically includes 2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM. As we expand, it is very important for us to be able to spin up new instances quickly and effortlessly. If there are any problems, UpCloud’s flexible APIs and open-source tools, such as Terraform provider and Go library, ensure that we can create fresh instances or whole environments easily from the scratch.

While our current usage of UpCloud is stable but small, we are primed to use more and more of their platform and its many features in the future, as our customers’ and our own needs continue to expand and develop. We are ready to bet on UpCloud as our cloud provider. That is why we are planning to move our development environment and all the backend systems to UpCloud as well.

Improvements

Thanks to UpCloud’s extremely fast and low latency network, we are able to effectively monitor our own and our customers’ systems and services. Low latency is a key requirement for us. This is in order to provide our customers with reliable real-time information about their systems and services. UpCloud’s many data centre locations allow us to create highly available monitoring and expand into new geographical areas easily. That is, as UpCloud expands, we expand. This gives us the ability to provide our customers around the world with reliable real-time monitoring.

Having a partner provider with a highly reliable and high-quality infrastructure is critical for us to be able to provide our customers with a reliable service. In this respect, UpCloud always lives up to or even exceeds our expectations.

Future plans

We are planning on expanding our instances to all new UpCloud data centres during the next year.

We would like to see load balancing as a service and a solution for filtering denial of service attacks. Load balancing as a service would help us to improve our management of Let's Encrypt certificates. Which in turn will allow us to provide our customers with even more reliable and secure services.

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