I keep conures. If you’ve never met one, they’re small, loud, and ridiculously social parrots. There’s something else about them that I didn’t know about before I got them. They’re incredibly alert and they’re known to be formidable ‘watchdogs’ because of it. The more I thought about what to call this company, the more I realised how analogous conures are for software that is all about warning and protecting something.
They seem to operate on an unspoken system of quorum.
If one of my conures sees something she doesn’t like, she will sound the alarm, but often this just causes the other one to become more alert and scan the horizon, looking for danger and making her own mind up about the threat that may be looming.
I’ll notice one screaching, and I often ignore it but if they both sound the alarm I know something is up. They’ve solved a problem that every monitoring tool I’d ever used got wrong.
Single-vantage monitors, the ones that check your site from one place, treat every nervous squawk as an emergency. A route flaps somewhere between their one server and yours, the check times out, and your phone lights up: SITE DOWN. You stumble out of bed, open your laptop, and the site is fine. It was fine the whole time. The path had a bad two seconds. The target never moved.
Do that to someone enough times and they stop trusting the alarm. Which is the worst possible outcome for an alarm.
Why I’m declaring war on false alarms
False alarms are detrimental for at least 2 major reasons:
They often take me out of focus on tasks that are important to me. While a real alarm justifies that distraction, a false alarm just ruins dinners, ruins the moment on a scenic hike, or ruins a relaxed evening with friends or family.
It eventually teaches you to become a little numb to them. If you get enough false alarms, eventually you start to write it off as just another one of those. You go on with whatever you were doing, and most of the time that works out alright because it’s a false alarm. But the one time you’re wrong, it defeated the point of having an alert the whole time. To add salt to the wound, all those distractions you endured counted for nothing. You still have to get a call from the client saying that the service wasn’t reachable, emails are not being delivered, etc.
None of that is exotic. It’s just taking seriously the idea that most false positives are path problems, not target problems, and building the tool around that fact.
The other half: one bird spots the hawk, the whole flock knows
There’s a second thing flocks do that stuck with me, and it comes straight from the day job.
Run servers for a while and you learn that they’re under a constant, low-grade drizzle of attack: SSH brute-force, WordPress login floods, scanners walking your paths looking for something soft. Individually it’s noise. But here’s what always bothered me: when one of my servers got hammered by some IP, the other servers had no idea. Each server defended itself alone, blind to what its neighbours were already seeing.
That’s not how a flock works. When one conure spots the hawk, they have a unique, intense screach that lets the whole flock know in an instant that they’re in danger. This kind of alarm visibly gets an ‘act now, ask later’ response.
So the same instinct shows up in the other half of the tool: one server spots an abusive IP, and every server you run blocks it, with logs as evidence for why that action was taken. We turn our entire client base into a flock, recording the behaviour of abusive IPs, and sharing that information across the network. A fleet of 3 servers gets the early warning of thousands of other servers in the network without having to go through the pain of slowly detecting them after many abusive requests.
So: Conure
Sentinel behaviour. A flock that watches from several angles and only cries out when enough of them agree. Small, loud, and paying attention. The name picked itself.
I should be straight with you about where this is: Conure isn’t live yet. I’m building it in the open, on my own fleet first. If the “flock never cries wolf” idea resonates, join the waitlist. I’ll bring people in as there’s room, and I’ll document the journey here in the meantime.
The birds sit with me all day while I work and they love playing on my keyboard when I am not paying attention, so it feels fitting that they have a product and a startup named after them.