Linode Managed

NOTE: If you're participating in the beta and discover an issue, please open a new topic in the Current Betas forum.

Your company's online presence is growing and your customers rely on your website and services. You do your best to wrangle the system administration duties and handle those on-call problems at all hours both day and night, but you'd rather be worrying about growing your business or catching up on some much needed rest. We can help.

Introducing Linode Managed

Linode Managed is service monitoring and incident response by our Managed support staff, regular system maintenance, and backups. In more detail:

• Monitoring
• Incident Response (human beings respond to and take care of problems 24/7/365)
• Regular System Maintenance (system & package updates)
• Managed Dashboard (a brand new area in the Linode Manager)
• Application tuning and architecture advice
• Backups

We've built a robust multi-homed monitoring system that distributes monitoring checks to multiple end points and in distinct facilities when applicable.

Linode Managed Beta

We'd love your assistance in getting this service fully tested, as well as any feedback you are able to provide. Feel free to join #linode-beta on irc.oftc.net.

Are there any requirements to participate in the beta?
Yes! There are a few criteria needed so that we can be sure to fully test the service: You must have multiple Linodes. You must allow us to have complete access to your systems. You're using a supported Debian or RedHat derived Linux distribution.

What should I expect?
During the first phase of this beta Managed staff may only be available to respond to monitoring events between 8AM-5PM EST, Monday through Friday. Keep in mind that this is a beta and monitoring and notifications may fail. You've been warned!

How do I participate in the Linode Managed Beta?
Please open a ticket with us and let us know why you think you'd be a good test case.

-Chris

Here are few screenshots of how great the new Linode Managed dashboard looks. Enjoy!

What's going to be the cost going forward? I might be interested, but I'd only want to set this up if I knew there's a chance I'll continue this after the 3 free months, and that depends heavily on the price.

According to word from IRC, it's $100 / Linode / month.

I'd be interested to know what Linode could actually support. There are a very large number of mail stacks, web stacks, and other software that customers could be using. Custom glue code is a nightmare to support.

At $100 USD a month this could be a good option for small companies that don't have full time IT staff.

Just wanted to let you guys know that we've published a guide on Linode Managed in the Linode Library that may give you a better idea of what the service is like:

http://library.linode.com/linode-managed

- Rick

Hi everyone,

For right now, we will not be accepting additional applicants into the Linode Managed beta. The response has been amazing so far - thank you!

- Rick

Darn. Smaller customers just can't get a break.

I'm still curious what "Application tuning and architecture advice" constitutes if/when it becomes more widely available. For example, will someone offer performance optimization advice, or will advice only be given if something's behaving so poorly that it's consuming all of a system's resources?

_________________
Amateur, eager to learn.
My hematology, oncology, and chemotherapy regimen wiki

We'll offer application tuning and architecture advice for both of the scenarios you've described. If you just want the Linode Managed team to log in an do an audit of your existing services, we can do that - likewise, if you're hitting a specific bottleneck, we're happy to offer advice on how to resolve it for you.

Will the backups be like the regular ones? Are you planning / looking into a system such as R1soft / Idera? (http://r1soft.idera.com/)

The Linode Backup Service (https://www.linode.com/backups/) is included with Linode Managed - it is not a different offering only for Managed customers.