Feeling buzzed up about innovative uses: how billing provider Chargebee use Blogtrottr

We are always passionate about what Blogtrottr does, and keen to hear from our users about the more novel ways they use our product.  When we heard from Chargebee, a SaaS billing provider (who incidentally are one of our suppliers as well as our customers) about how they have solved some of their own internal business issues by using Blogtrottr we were pretty excited.

Chargebee is able to use Blogtrottr in more than the traditional ways:  Of course they subscribe to a number of blogs to keep up to date on current security issues and possible vulnerabilities, and manage this via Blogtottr to ensure they miss nothing vital.  However in addition to this they have used Blogtrottr innovatively to solve issues, and are happy to let us share some of these solutions with you.  

Here is Balaji Jayaraman, CSO of Chargebee, with more details:

RSS Feed

Chargebee uses both internal and external monitoring for our service. For internal monitoring we use Amazon's cloud watch. Cloud watch monitors CPU, memory, disk and other application related custom metrics that we use. We had incidents where we thought cloud watch would do its job but it would have gone down and we wouldn’t know about it.

We started to use Blogtrottr to get cloud watch status as RSS feed so that our team will know that we have problems with cloud watch and we can closely monitor our production instances.

Email Updates

We needed to have all the updates Amazon does with respective softwares installed to its instances. For instance, for any critical update, we would get notified via emails in real-time. This way we get to know about OS updates or fixes immediately.

We have integrations with other service providers. Some have email subscriptions but some have only feeds. We use Blogtrottr to get their status updates via email.

Alerts & Monitoring

When we get payment failure alerts, we also get notified at the same time from Blogtrottr regarding payment gateways status. This makes it easy for the monitoring team to check payment gateway's status than spending time in analysing on Chargebee’s end.

You can see why we were excited to hear from them.  Chargebee have been innovative in the ways they have used Blogtrottr to utilise its potential.  We are really glad to be part of such an interesting solution, especially for such an fantastic company.

Want to share how you use Blogtrottr with the community? Get in touch by emailing phil@blogtrottr.com

A quick way to subscribe to RSS feeds using Chrome

We recently received this fantastic suggestion from Alejandro on how you can setup Google’s Chrome Browser to auto-detect RSS feeds available on the websites you browse and to give you a quick way to subscribe to a feed on Blogtrottr.

1. In Chrome install the extension ‘RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)’ by going to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd and selecting ‘Add to Chrome’

2. Edit the extension’s settings by selecting the ‘Subscribe to this feed’ button (RSS feed icon) in the ‘Omnibox’ (top right of the browser) and choosing ‘options’

3. Click ‘Add’ and enter the following details:

Description: Blogtrottr
URL: http://blogtrottr.com/?subscribe=%s&email=YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS (replacing YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS with your Blogtrottr email address)



4. Click ‘Save’

5. Select each of the other options (Bloglines and My Yahoo) in turn and select ‘Remove’

6. Check the option ‘Always use my default reader when subscribing to feeds’ (unless you want to preview feeds to check their quality before subscribing)


Now whenever you visit a website in Chrome with an RSS feed the ‘Subscribe to this feed’ button will turn orange. Just click on the button and then click ‘Feed Me’ to add the feed to your Blogtrottr account.

Thanks for the tip Alejandro!

Have a fantastic tip you want to share with the community? Get in touch by emailing phil@blogtrottr.com