I have uptimerobot.com send me an email when it’s down. That email is forwarded to my cell phone via text using [phonenumber]@txt.att.net.
Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
21–30 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#22I have Telegraf running on all my machines that pipes data to an InfluxDB for storage and then Grafana for visualizations.
Gives me all sorts of useful information that I use to make decisions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#23What tools do you use to monitor uptime of your web apps and/or APIs?
I use a custom AWS Lambda function. It fires every four hours or so, and tries to make an https connection to each configured URL (the URLs are stored in a file in S3) and if the site is either down, or if there is an SSL error (which probably means an expired certificate) then it sends me a text message using SNS.
The whole thing is about 50 lines of code, and that's in Java. And it doesn't even come close to exceeding the free tier limit of Lambda calls, so it doesn't even cost anything so far.
To be fair, I could have used a 3rd party service, but writing this thing was my first foray into using Lambda, so I did it as much for the learning experience as anything. But it works really well, so I doubt I'll replace it anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#24https://updown.io/ Best value of any tool I've ever used. It does literally everything you asked. I didn't even know it checked SSL expiry till it pinged me.
UpDown is nice but I'm considering moving because they don't support multiple domains on the same status page. I don't need a single status page for each of the domains I own, that would be ridiculous.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#25UptimeRobot 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/
I second this. Been using the free plan of UptimeRobot for years without a problem. It pings your website every 5 minutes and you get an email alert when it’s down.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#26I 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.
Are you worried about that endpoint being used for DoS or is it light enough?
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#27Once every few months, I go to the website.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#28We have been fairly happy with Runscope [0] for fairly simplistic monitoring of api response codes and body payloads. My biggest complaint is probably the lack of individualized response data after >= 24 hours.
Still waiting to see if the CA Technologies acquisition [1] makes things worse or not.
[0] https://www.runscope.com/ [1] https://blog.runscope.com/posts/301
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#29What tools do you use to monitor uptime of your web apps and/or APIs? I use a custom AWS Lambda function. It fires every four hours or so, and tries to make an https connection to each configured URL (the URLs are stored in a file in S3) and if the site is either down, or if there is an SSL error (which probably means an expired certificate) then it sends me a text message using SNS. The whole thing is about 50 lines…
Just wondering, did you use Scheduled Events or what did you use to implement firing on an interval?
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#30Along with all our other services, they're monitored by our off-prem Icinga instance.