What tools do you use to monitor uptime of your web apps and/or APIs? Also, how do you track SSL/domain name expiry?
Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
1–10 of 104 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#2https://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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#3[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#4uptimerobot.com
Use automatic let's encrypt certs and forget about it
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#5[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#6If you want a light (and free) DIY solution, it's pretty straightforward to build a basic uptime monitor (with connections to Slack, SMS, whatever) using Standard Library [0] and Scheduled Tasks, one of our engineers just posted this article (you can build from your browser):
https://hackernoon.com/build-an-uptime-monitor-in-minutes-wi...
Another option if you don't feel in the mood for DIY is TJ Holowaychuk's Apex Ping: https://apex.sh/ping/. Great service, run by a solo developer, reasonable price.
Disclaimer: I founded Standard Library. :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#7I see that it's trending but without any comments - so allow me a shameless plug, I created a tool to monitor my APIs (can schedule calls, do response content checks, send alerts etc): http://www.apilope.com
If you drop me a line after you signed up I can flag you as a demo user that's free forever - or at least until you want to pay or cancel :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#8I've written custom bash scripts that Zabbix runs and alerts based on their output.
For example, domain expiry - I have a script that Zabbix runs once a day that does a whois and grabs the expiry date for the domain in question. Convert that to a unix string and subtract the current date on it. Echo that from the script.
In Zabbix we can now alert if that item's value is Edit: Oh actually on the whois, I remember it was a huge pain in the butt getting the expiry for a variety of different domains - I now use https://jsonwhoisapi.com/ to get the whois info
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#9I use uptimerobot.com to monitor uptime for personal or client stuff that isn't really mission-critical.
It's not perfect but I hardly have issues with it.
Honestly, I don't do expiry checks...
Re: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?
#10 - Custom health check endpoint: checks a bunch of internal status metrics (NewRelic metrics for speed and error rate, DB connection check, a few E2E tests). Returns a simple overall status: OK, Warning (error rate high but not critical, slower than usual response times), Critical (DB down, errors high, anything else). Benefit of this approach is that it's easy to add new health checks any time you add a feature (example: is redis up?).
- Pingdom: polls custom endpoint every minute. Sends notification to PagerDuty if critical, or if warning for more than 5 mins.
- PagerDuty to notify team
- SSL Expiry: calendar notifications (whole team) and reminder emails from our SSL cert issuer