Integration heartbeat monitor and owner escalation board
Problem
Integrations between ticketing, membership, finance and athlete systems are built point to point by whichever vendor set them up, and nobody owns watching whether they still run. A nightly sync fails and nobody notices until someone querying a finance report finds the numbers do not match the ticketing platform, or a service desk ticket arrives asking why a membership record has not updated. The current early warning system is a person spotting a stale dashboard and posting a screenshot in the IT messaging group. There is no list of what should have run overnight, no record of the last successful run per integration, and no agreed point at which a delay becomes an incident somebody is paged for.
Product idea
A status board listing every integration the organisation depends on, each with a heartbeat: last successful run, records moved, and time since. Each integration has a threshold set by its owner, an hour, a day, whatever the business impact requires, and a named person to notify when that threshold is breached, before the deadline that depends on it, such as a morning reconciliation report. Alerts go to email or an existing messaging channel rather than a new inbox to check. It does not diagnose why an integration failed or attempt to fix it. It only tells the right person that something has stopped, early enough to act before someone downstream notices first.
Who it is for
Heads of IT who need one place to see what has stopped, data managers who currently find out from a bad report, and service desk leads fielding the resulting tickets.
Possible first version
A simple heartbeat endpoint each integration pings on completion, or a scheduled poll where it cannot. A status board showing green, amber or red per integration with last run time and a manual form for registering a new one. Configurable staleness thresholds per integration and email escalation to a named owner when breached. Out of scope for version one: automatic discovery of integrations, root cause diagnosis, retry or self healing logic, and any native connector into the middleware platform itself, which stays manual until the board proves useful.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 4-6 week first release
- Roles involved
- Head of IT, Data manager, Service desk lead
- Relevant to
- Professional club, League office, Federation / governing body, Venue & stadium operator, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Integration and API middleware, Service desk and ticketing tools, Messaging apps
- Product framing
- Monitor
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have ready before this could show anything useful?
A list of the integrations that matter and one signal from each that it ran, either a webhook it calls on completion or a log file or table we can poll on a schedule. Nothing needs to be rebuilt to add that signal in most cases, a scheduled task usually already logs a timestamp somewhere. What takes the real time is agreeing thresholds and owners integration by integration, which is a conversation, not a technical task, and is worth doing before any building starts.
We already pay for an integration and API middleware platform with its own monitoring. Why do we need this too?
Middleware platforms typically monitor what runs inside them well and say nothing about the integrations that sit outside that platform, which in most organisations is still most of them: exports built by a vendor, scheduled database jobs, scripts nobody remembers writing. This does not replace platform native monitoring where you have it. It sits above all of it as one list with one set of thresholds, so the head of IT is not checking five different tools to answer one question: is anything broken right now.
Our team already ignores half the alerts we get. Won't this just add more noise?
Only if thresholds are set too tight, which is a configuration problem rather than a reason not to build it. The point of naming an owner and a deadline per integration is to keep the volume low enough that an alert means something: it fires because a report due at nine will be wrong, not because a sync ran two minutes late. If an integration cannot be given a meaningful threshold, it probably should not be on the board yet.
What happens if something breaks overnight or during a live event, when nobody is watching the board?
That is the case it is built for. Nobody is expected to be staring at the board out of hours; the escalation rule does the watching, and it pushes to a named person's email or existing messaging channel rather than waiting to be seen. It does not call or text on its own in version one, so an owner who mutes notifications overnight will not be woken by it, which is a limitation worth deciding on deliberately rather than by accident.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
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