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Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?

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Re: Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?

#81

Post by [deleted] »

ericpauley wrote: post #72
notatoad wrote: post #9

we use updown.io for this and are happy with it. there's probably functionality built in to your other monitoring tools, or you could write a little serverless function to to it, but for me i really like to have it isolated. i wanted a tool that's not part of the rest of our monitoring stack, not part of our own codebase, and not something we manage.

Seconding Updown. Easy setup, pay-as-you-go, no nonsense. I wish they had a better way to hit your phone. Currently it supports Slack and SMS but I need a way to make my phone go crazy when things go wrong (you can set Updown as an emergency contact but this has many downsides as well).

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?

#83

Post by compumike »

benjbrooks wrote: post #69

Update: Thanks for your recommendations everyone! We decided to go the route of measuring successful hits on the endpoint associated with our docs (inside our monitoring service). That's the default health check associated with our load balancer, so it gets hit periodically (built-in cron job). We just added a signoz alert that is triggered if the sum of those successful calls over the past X seconds falls below a th…

> That's the default health check associated with our load balancer, so it gets hit periodically (built-in cron job).

Be aware that you’re still leaving quite a bit of surface area unmonitored: any sort of issue between your clients and the load balancer could break and not fire an alert. DNS configuration, firewall issue, SSL certificates, network outage, etc etc.

If you’re really trying to assert that some HTTP resource is publicly reachable, it’s still a good idea to have some external testing service periodically hitting your endpoint, running some assertions on the response, and alerting you if it’s failing for more than X minutes. (We do this; see my other reply.)

Hope that helps!

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