We all developers depend on third parties, service and software providers. They sometimes announce events such as deprecations and service shutdowns. Such events need your attention and a timely response.
Do you monitor the activity of your third parties? If so how?
Top comments (7)
Two things I do:
Thanks for your reply. You made me think about my own question.
My original intent was to investigate how we developers monitor announcements like this one:
Starting January 23, 2018, we will no longer support Google Mobile Ads (GMA) SDK versions lower than 7.0.0 for Android or iOS. To continue serving mobile ads from AdMob, Ad Exchange, or DFP after this date, please upgrade to the latest Google Mobile Ads SDK
This announcement was published on support.google.com/admob/release-n...
Well, yes. Moesif won't capture news announcements like that.
But if say an micro service or external service is upgraded (or if team for that micro service is doing continuous integration and new version is released automatically), and errors are caused by that, moesif actually will detect and attribute it correctly.
Sometimes the error caused by upgrade of micro service can be really subtle. For example, if you have a mesh of micro services that depends on each other, error at one location could actually be caused by another micro service that seemed to function fine.
If they have a newsletter you can subscribe to like drupal.org/security or Unity's asset store update notifications I'll subscribe.
Otherwise I have so many different sets of 3rd parties across so many different types of projects that it is, unfortunately, not something I actively pursue.
Thanks for your reply.
Did you ever find yourself in a rush to meet a deadline from one of your third parties?
No, fortunately not. Generally speaking most of our client work is self contained and doesn't depend on 3rd party data sources or hosting approaches like Heroku. And when it has, it has been a short-lived project that was probably done by the time the problem hit.
Sometimes we make internal projects that might rely more heavily on third parties because those projects have budgets of $0 so the cheaper the better, and we just note that (for instance) our Google Trends display has started to act wonky and get around to fixing it sometime down the road.
Changelogs and package managers honestly.