Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#11

Post by kels » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

I have no affiliation with any of these companies.

I use StatusCake for basic uptime monitoring for websites. I switched to them from Pingdom because they are cheaper. Only downsides I've had with StatusCake is if something is down it doesn't give you the cause. Pingdom would show you the trace route. That has made it hard to tell and I would get quite a few false positives saying sites were down. I haven't had false positive issues for months now though. Their paid plans have SSL/domain monitoring.

Monitis for cheap Linux CPU/RAM/Load monitoring.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#12

Post by mvanbaak » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

Amazon route53 checks for monitoring. Cert renew either aws certificate manager or letsencrypt(depending on the usecase) so it’s handled automatically

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#13

Post by sparrish » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

NodePing has powerful monitoring for web app, APIs, and websockets. Checks for SSL and domain expiry as well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#14

Post by dddw » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:04 PM UTC

keychest.net for ssl expires great free service, please consider donating to it!

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#15

Post by quizme2000 » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

I started using Site 24x7 from Zoho about a year ago for all of my apps and my clients "basic" websites.

It ended up being a great tool for me because it allows for the most basic ping test and to content checks to be setup in 10 mins. It also has the ability to add reporting based on apps, servers, and databases. The aws add-ins helped me tune my usage, as i was paying way to much for a couple services that i could downgrade with out impacting my apps.

I feel it is priced right and a good value up to the 89/month plan.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#16

Post by josefresco » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

Pingdom, SiteUptime, and Montastic. None of these are relied upon for mission critical monitoring. I set them up as a sort of "canary in the coal mine" for each of my servers, to help alert me to issues.

I also created a very hacky, browser start page which has GIF's that are pulled from each of my servers. Sort of like how "game copy world" used to setup their mirror page. Super unsophisticated but it allows me to do an "uptime check" every time I open my browser.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#17

Post by 8ytecoder » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

External monitoring: Pingdom/Site24x7. Lesson learnt - have the alerts route to at least a few emails outside of your company domain if you use the same domain for email.

Site monitoring: NewRelic

PagerDuty/OpsGenie: For alert routing if you have more than 2 people.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#18

Post by aequitas » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

I discovered earlier this week that Keybase.io also offers pseudo monitoring by emailing me the proof on my website was no longer valid due to broken https.

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#19

Post by js4ever » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:11 PM UTC

UptimeRobot is quick to setup and have a lot of options, including a white label portal [0] to monitor status it's reliable and cheap ($54/year)

I'm not affiliated with them, just an happy customer

[0] E.g. status page: https://status.appdrag.com/

Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

#20

Post by philip1209 » Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

I basically add a /global-health endpoint on my server. It executes a bunch of checks programmatically - e.g. database connection, rendering working, etc. It would be easy to add in "fail if cert expires in next month".

Then, I monitor just that one endpoint with Stackdriver (because it's easy). If any of the checks fail, it logs it, prints details, and sets a 500 header code. Adding new checks is just a code change.