Introducing Monitor. Use Twilio Data Like Never Before

Today, we’re thrilled to announce monitoring of Twilio accounts and apps, giving you the tools to actively prevent security holes, audit for compliance and investigate application issues caused by human error and app behavior.

Until now, IT Ops and SecInfo teams have lacked the detailed operational insight needed when voice, video and text are added to applications. Simple questions like “What kind of havoc did last week’s bad application deployment cause to my Twilio account?” and “Who deleted call recordings from last month?” have been tough to answer.

For developers, this lack of operational data has another consequence. It directly impacts how well an application can be architected for uptime.

Monitor addresses both of these needs. It offers full visibility and analysis of Twilio resources to Ops teams and makes all of this rich data available via the API so that your app can adjust to new account information in real-time.

Included with Monitor are previously available App Monitor (now called “Alerts”), Usage Triggers and App Monitor Triggers (now called “Alert Triggers”) as well as all new event-logging and change-tracking capabilities called Events.

Events

With Events, you are now just a few clicks away from seeing what changes were made to your Twilio account, by whom, and when. Every activity is accounted for, whether it’s someone making updates from the Twilio console, your app interacting with the API or even changes made by a Twilio admin.

It’s also a great operational tool for making short work of day-to-day questions about account activity. For instance, you can use this for compliance purposes to verify that only authorized users have modified production resources. Or for security forensics to investigate a rogue user to see what changes that person made over a specific time period.

Questions like these, which would cost countless hours of searching and debugging, can now be answered in a few seconds from the Twilio console.

One customer participating in an early trial of Monitor is CallTrackingMetrics, a call tracking service using Twilio to provision and track tens of thousands of phone numbers and perform millions of API requests a month to manage them. Todd Fisher, founder of CallTrackingMetrics commented “Our phone-number inventory with Twilio changes so rapidly that in the past we’ve had a hard time tracking down specific issues with individual numbers. Events fills a critical gap in our logging, telling us exactly what’s happening with our phone-numbers and without us having to manage or scale the solution.”

Give it a Spin

You can start using Monitor right away. As of today, it is fully enabled on every Twilio account as a Public Beta. Once it’s Generally Available (GA) later this year, pricing will be pay-as-you-go like the rest of the Twilio platform.

For most of you, using Monitor will be absolutely free. After the free usage tier is exceeded, there are nominal charges related to recording, accessing and storing event logs. Pricing details are available on the Monitor product and console pages.

We think Monitor will give you a much stronger toolkit for building and maintaining Twilio-powered apps. Learn more about Monitor here. We can’t wait to see what you build.