Red Kite

Red Kite  /  Join the beta

Tell us what you would like watched.

Red Kite is free while it is in beta. The link to install it is emailed to you the moment you press the button, so you are never waiting on us to get started. A person, not an autoresponder, will write back as well. What we would like in return is to hear what it gets wrong on your machines.

The form

Only the first two are needed. The rest help us tell you anything useful before you start, and they are the only measure we have of whether any of this is reaching the right people.

The button turns on once that box is ticked. It is the one line we ask everybody to read, and it is the whole of what you are agreeing to.

We use your address to reply and to send you the occasional note about the beta. Nothing else, and never to anybody else. Ask us to remove you and we will. See what we do with your details.

What we are asking of you

A beta is a two-way arrangement and it is worth writing down which way each part goes. You get working software for nothing. What we would like back is what it got wrong, a figure it reported that was not true, an alert that never arrived, an alert that arrived and should not have, a disk it could not read.

Please do not make Red Kite the only thing watching your machines yet. A monitoring system that is trusted and then misses something is worse than having none at all, that argument is most of this website, and it applies to us as much as to anybody else. Run it alongside whatever you already have, and tell us where the two disagree. That disagreement is exactly what we are looking for.

It is provided as it is, with no warranty, and it will probably not be free for ever. If that changes we will say so well before it does, and anything you already have installed will keep running: there is no licence check to fail, because there is no licence check.

What we do with your details

Short, because there is not much of it. We are a small team, not an advertising business, and a monitoring product that was careless with your data would be a poor advertisement for itself.

  • What we keep. Your name, your email address, and the four answers above. Nothing else, a signup does not record your IP address, and there are no analytics, no cookies and no third-party scripts anywhere on this site.
  • The one exception, and why it exists. If something sent from this form looks like an attempt to put code into it rather than fill it in, we do record the address it came from, along with the time and a short excerpt of what was sent. Three of those and the connection is blocked: you are told each time, and told how many attempts are left. It is kept because a block has to know who it is blocking. We would rather say this plainly than quietly change what the line above means. If you think we have read something the wrong way, write to contact@redkite.info and a person will lift it.
  • Why. To reply to you, and to send you the occasional note about the beta, a new agent worth trying, or something we have fixed that you reported.
  • Who else sees it. Nobody. It is not sold, shared, or sent to a mailing-list provider. It sits in the same database as the rest of the hub, on a server we run.
  • How long. Until the beta ends or you ask us to stop, whichever comes first.
  • Getting removed. Write to contact@redkite.info and say so. No form, no sign-in, no reason needed, and we will delete the row rather than mark it hidden.