How can I get alerted when the Firebase service goes down?

Question

I know I can manually go to status.firebase.com but I need to be alerted immediately when my firebase app goes down and when it comes back up.

I thought I could possibly use dingitsup.com to send myself a notification, but i don't know where to point it.

I would also like to have the option of automatically displaying a message to my users when Firebase is down to let them know the system is down and its not a problem on their end. Is there a Zapier integration i could use to achieve this?

Any help would be great! Thanks

Answer 1

Programmatically, you could use a service like Pingdom to send yourself a notification, and could ping an endpoint on your-firebase.firebaseio.com/some-public-endpoint.json.

Also, @FirebaseStatus is a good resource actively updated by the Firebase folks.

Answer 2

Could you write something to use the connection state?

https://www.firebase.com/docs/managing-presence.html (broken) new link: https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/offline-capabilities

I use something similar in my apps to detect if the user has a connection, and display a notice if they don't.

Answer 3

I just figured a way

Firebase.enableLogging(function(logMessage) {
    if(logMessage && logMessage.indexOf("Long-poll script failed to load") !== -1 && navigator.onLine){
        console.error('Its dead Jim! Firebase seems to be down for this user');
    }
});

I'm not sure how firebase works under the hoods but I've seen users connected in a previously open tab and if they open a new tab firebase won't connect when it's down.

This logging function is called a lot, and when firebase is down our console.error will be call every ~5s or something. Make sure to debounce whatever you'll do in the console.error's place.