DaHouse + Astry: monitoring for small businesses, with real on-call behind it

In a medical practice, a real estate agency or a shop, nobody has time to watch over IT. Yet when the Wi-Fi goes down, the file server stops responding or the payment terminal is offline on a Saturday morning, the whole business grinds to a halt.

That is what DaHouse takes care of. Based in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, DaHouse is an IT service provider for small businesses and shops. It installs a small box at each customer's premises that continuously monitors what needs to work, and raises the alarm before anyone notices the outage.

Raising the alarm is exactly where Astry comes in. We work with DaHouse so that every alert from their boxes becomes an incident, followed through to resolution.

A probe detects, but someone still has to react

Monitoring is only as good as the response chain behind it. For a provider looking after dozens of small organizations, that chain has a few promises to keep:

• the right person is notified, even on a Saturday or a weekday evening;
• if they are not available, someone else takes over;
• a network outage that makes ten devices unreachable at once does not trigger ten alerts;
• the customer knows the problem is being handled, without having to call;
• afterwards, you can trace what happened and how long it took.

That is exactly what Astry does for on-call teams.

How it works

When the DaHouse box detects a failure (payment terminal unreachable, Wi-Fi down, switch or server failure), the alert is sent to Astry through our incoming integration API. Then:

1. An incident is opened automatically, with the customer, site and device involved.
2. An on-call technician is paged, according to the current schedule, by voice call, SMS or mobile notification.
3. If nobody answers, the alert escalates to the next technician.
4. Related alerts are grouped: when a shop's internet box goes down, there is one outage to handle, not one incident per device that became unreachable.
5. The customer is kept informed through a notification or a status page, without having to pick up the phone.
6. Recovery closes the incident, and the history feeds reporting: number of incidents per customer, time to acknowledge and time to resolve.

Two concrete examples

Saturday, 10:15 am, in a shop. The payment terminal stops responding. The DaHouse box detects it, an incident opens in Astry and the on-call technician is paged. They find that the terminal lost its connection after the internet box restarted, and walk the shop manager through reconnecting it over the phone. The shop lost only a few minutes of sales.

Thursday, 10:40 pm, in an accounting firm. The box spots a series of logins from an unusual location. This is no longer a simple outage. In Astry, the alert triggers a crisis from a template prepared with DaHouse: the right people are summoned, an action checklist guides the response (check the affected accounts, cut suspicious access, inform the managing partner) and every step is timestamped. The next day, the firm has a complete report, useful for its insurer and for any reporting obligations.

What each brings

Are you a small business or a shop looking for monitored IT, with real on-call behind it? Contact DaHouse or the Astry team.