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Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

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

#31

Post by mindcrime »

exceptionallyOK wrote: post #29
mindcrime wrote: post #23

What 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?

Yeah, it's just using the standard AWS scheduled events stuff. Nothing fancy. Then again, our needs (for now) are pretty simple. I basically just want to know if our website goes down or if our SSL certificate expires or something.

One of the sites is a SaaS offering, but it's not live yet, so I don't need to stay super-on-top-of-it. Once it's live we'll want more frequent monitoring and some other stuff, so we might either move to another approach, or supplement this with something else.

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

#32

Post by iw0 »

Spivak wrote: post #26
philip1209 wrote: post #20

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.

Are you worried about that endpoint being used for DoS or is it light enough?

The way i do it is running the checks in a background every x minutes and add the result in a json file. It’s fast and safe.

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

#34

Post by johns »

CodeAlong wrote: post #28

We 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

Note that the retention is not time-based: https://www.runscope.com/support/kb/test-result-retention Hopefully we have a better solution for this in the future.

There are more resources working on Runscope than ever before. CA continues to invest in stability, new features and support. CA is also going through an acquisition and that introduces more variables, but as of today (1+ year after acquiring us), CA has been extremely supportive of Runscope.

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

#36

Post by philip1209 »

Spivak wrote: post #26
philip1209 wrote: post #20

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.

Are you worried about that endpoint being used for DoS or is it light enough?

It's rate-limited and behind Cloudflare. But, the checks are like "can I connect to Redis", so it is pretty lightweight.

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

#37

Post by jwklemm »

If you're looking beyond uptime + certs, we do functional + visual browser testing at https://ghostinspector.com/. Lots of folks use it for monitoring their website or application (in additional to their CI process). We have a free tier that includes scheduling. [Disclosure: I'm the founder]

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

#38

Post by thestepafter »

jwklemm wrote: post #37

If you're looking beyond uptime + certs, we do functional + visual browser testing at https://ghostinspector.com/ . Lots of folks use it for monitoring their website or application (in additional to their CI process). We have a free tier that includes scheduling. [Disclosure: I'm the founder]

I have been using Ghost Inspector for awhile now, so far it has been fantastic. It is really nice to be able to push to a branch and get notified in Slack a couple seconds later with any issues including screenshots.
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