[noahnoahnoah]

(I work at 37signals)

Our test logs in, causes some data to be fetched from the database, and renders a page which we then check against what it should return.

We haven’t (to date) had either any false positives or false negatives (when it alerts, the site is really down, and if it doesn’t alert, the site is really up).

This obviously isn’t a replacement for functional or integration tests to ensure that a commit doesn’t cause a piece of the app to stop working, but it does test the full infrastructure stack to make sure that it’s performing the way we expect it to.

[foobarbazetc]

Thanks Noah. If it's hitting the DB then that's great.

I'm just trying to point out that the definition of "uptime" is hazy at best. :)