Route53 Health Checks & SNS can send sms message without any Lambda involved.
Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
51–55 of 55 posts
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, plus most engineering time is worth at minimum $60+/h, which would pay for a year or more with most of these services.
On the other hand, it's 'set up once and it just keeps chugging along', and isn't Yet Another SaaS To Manage. Also, if you want a 'proper' ops alerting SaaS, you're looking at something along the lines of $50/user/mo or $15/server/mo, neither of which is trivial.
Yeah assuming nothing falls apart with the custom implementation maintenance-wise. Programmers have a hard time focusing on their real goals though, we often re-implement things that really aren't worth the time or money.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve had issues with Pingdom at work. We don’t use them ourselves, but we host web sites, and some customer of ours used Pingdom to monitor their web site hosted on our servers. The customer would complain to us about downtime reported by Pingdom, but we would read the logs and find everything OK, with multiple successful accesses from other people during the time which Pingdom reported our customer’s site as being…
Doesn't services like Pingdom support multiple ping locations? If all of those fail, there's a very high chance there's an actual problem, if not with your server then with your (ISPs) connectivity.
The question is what customers of monitoring systems expect from the monitoring. Do pingdoms explain what a failure means, or are they only providing data and then its up to the customer to interpret that data.
Multiple ping locations is helpful in bringing more data points, but it doesn't address the problem of explaining what the data means. For example, pingdom could provide triangulation of the failure if fault identification was part of the businesses model of monitoring.
I would describe the criticism of pingdom as a failure of expectations. Pingdom is not a security service, a monitoring service, or fault identification service. They are a single test, and the data you get back is useless unless interpreted and verified.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes you were down for some of your users. If that's ok for you that's fine. But if I were you I would be calling my ISP and trying to sort out why customers from location X can't access but customers from location Y can. If you're providing a service to your users, and they say that the service is down using pingdom, you should be looking into, not just saying "Works on my machine".
Why should we be the ones to look into it? It was a random intermittent short-duration fault in the middle if the Internet, at some unknown place on the then-current path between us and Pingdom. Why should not Pingdom be at least equally as obligated to look into it? After all, they’re the ones actually using the failing connection, in order to monitor our and others’ services. But no, Pingdom simply report us as bei…
Well if you're not providing a service to others, then you shouldn't be the ones to look into it. But if you're providing a service to users and they tell you it's down then you should. It might be that your ISP has a misconfigured route that is flapping and sometimes causes errors in some locations. Or a netmask is wrong somewhere and certain ip address can't be accessed. It might not be a temporary thing. And you if it's your ISP fault they might be able to fix it.
You've seem to think that you have to investigate the issues. On the contrary, you bump it up to your isp to investigate. If your ISP is regularly having these issues then it might be time to change ISPs to one with a better peering agreement.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we be the ones to look into it? It was a random intermittent short-duration fault in the middle if the Internet, at some unknown place on the then-current path between us and Pingdom. Why should not Pingdom be at least equally as obligated to look into it? After all, they’re the ones actually using the failing connection, in order to monitor our and others’ services. But no, Pingdom simply report us as bei…
Well if you're not providing a service to others, then you shouldn't be the ones to look into it. But if you're providing a service to users and they tell you it's down then you should. It might be that your ISP has a misconfigured route that is flapping and sometimes causes errors in some locations. Or a netmask is wrong somewhere and certain ip address can't be accessed. It might not be a temporary thing. And you i…
If the outages were one of:
1. Reported as being experienced by an actual user of a web site,
2. Longer than a a couple of minutes at most (usually just a few seconds),
3. or happened more frequently than a few times per month,
then I might consider reporting it to my ISP. As it is, it’s not worth it. “Cosmic rays, man.” (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...).