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Show HN: Simple monitoring service

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Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#52

Post by ivanhoe »

Maybe you should slow down the ping interval a bit, because there is no authentication and someone might run it on a big number of IPs of the same network class, and that will quickly get your IP banned on routers. No one really needs to check the server every 5 seconds (not on free service at least). Perhaps you can make a burst of 4-5 pings every minute or 5 minutes, that would be quite sufficient IMHO, and would significantly reduce your traffic and expenses.

Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#53

Post by fuzzfree »

Checking every 5 seconds...! You will probably get blocked by a firewall....

Every 5 minutes is more than fine for a free service (and do future upgrades for every 1 min or constant monitoring).

In any case let the user select their interval.

Nice work btw!

Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#54

Post by vruiz »

ivanhoe wrote: post #52

Maybe you should slow down the ping interval a bit, because there is no authentication and someone might run it on a big number of IPs of the same network class, and that will quickly get your IP banned on routers. No one really needs to check the server every 5 seconds (not on free service at least). Perhaps you can make a burst of 4-5 pings every minute or 5 minutes, that would be quite sufficient IMHO, and would s…

I gave the interval some thought, and while I might have to increase it in the future, I think 5 seconds is a good place to start. This is just a single innocuous ICMP echo packet, not port scanning. And a single user can only set up 10 pings, so it will require quite some manual effort to generate some noticeable traffic.

When I implement HTTP checks however, yes, the interval will have to be in the minutes.

Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#55

Post by vruiz »

fuzzfree wrote: post #53

Checking every 5 seconds...! You will probably get blocked by a firewall.... Every 5 minutes is more than fine for a free service (and do future upgrades for every 1 min or constant monitoring). In any case let the user select their interval. Nice work btw!

I've never been block by just pinging anything, but if that happens for someone, well... it'll simply won't work for that user. No big deal, that's the upside of being a free no-SLA service :)

As for my own side of the net, I asked someone at DO and I was told that it should not be a problem.

Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#56

Post by gingerlime »

halayli wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems hard to compete with pingdom As a DevOps, I'd like to disagree with this. Pingdom previously was a joy to work with. Now that they're attempting to bring in PagerDuty-esq features (escalation policies instead of simple alerting), their UX leaves a bit to be desired. Also, I don't have high hopes after the Solarwinds acquisition.

I created https://webmon.com . I'd love to hear your feedback on it since you were a Pingdom customer.

I've been looking for a pingdom replacement for the very same reasons GP mentioned. Webmon does look interesting, even though it does appear a bit more expensive. It seems penny-pinching if you consider the cost of downtime, but despite all my complaints about pingdom, it still works and does its job. So I'd need a compelling reason to switch and it's always easy to convince upstream when the price is cheaper or you get something better.

Just a quick question: what's a 'target'? is it the equivalent of a pingdom 'check'? or is this an endpoint IP that we can run several checks over?

Some feedback after a quick glance on the homepage - it's nice and seems to provide the most important info, but I'd appreciate some more in-depth info on some areas (to answer my question about targets and possibly other questions about other stuff: what's a user, what's a dashboard etc)

Re: Show HN: Simple monitoring service

#59

Post by vruiz »

Kliment wrote: post #57

Does this mean if I set up an alert for a server anyone can then add me to any number of alerts without further confirmation?

if someone knowns your email address and that you've confirmed it, then yes, that someone could set up more, but the limit is 10.

If that ever happens to you, you could: 1) pause the unwanted alerts, and remove some only when you need new ones. 2) if you panic, use the "unsubscribe" button that will block any future emails to your address.

Having such a low barrier of entry does not come without tradeoffs.

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