Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
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Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#2From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph.
Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don't have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren't dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your outage is that AWS is having issues. Now your site and your monitoring is down.
Much better to outsource to people who obsess over doing this right and making sure they are properly redundant.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#3And I'm sure Lambda will never go down. Right? Right??
(It has. Completely and silently stopped processing against Kinesis queues for a few hours recently. Guess what AWS Step is built on?)
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#4From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph. Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don't have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren't dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your ou…
> outsource to people who obsess over doing this right
Completely agree! I often have to fight that "I could just build that myself" mentality, which glosses over the points you made so well.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#5And I'm sure Lambda will never go down. Right? Right?? (It has. Completely and silently stopped processing against Kinesis queues for a few hours recently. Guess what AWS Step is built on?)
Well, sure, of course it will, but I don't think Nick is advocating replacing a complete, full featured monitoring system with this.
It could be very useful to, for example, keep an eye on your monitoring system. At $work, we have a pretty extensive monitoring system that we've built out. We use an external service to watch over the monitoring system, though, to alert us of any issues with it that we haven't otherwise caught.
Besides, like he said, it's "fun" and kinda neat.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#6From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph. Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don't have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren't dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your ou…
> outsource to people who obsess over doing this right Completely agree! I often have to fight that "I could just build that myself" mentality, which glosses over the points you made so well.
This and that!
It's the same as "Twitter clone" with just posting messages with 140 char limit and "build a blog in 15 minutes".
Alerting over a downed website are is sorta like a glacier, there's so much under the surface, if you just see the surface you're missing out.
1. Multiple locations 2. Multiple check intervals 3. SMS/email provider switch on fail 4. Auto recovery of your checkers 5. Multiple providers with a single storage.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#7I wrote something similar in bash and put it into a docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/simplepush/alerta
Just running this docker image on a server you want to monitor is enough.
Instead of Twilio it uses Simplepush (https://simplepush.io).
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#8I wrote Apex Ping (https://apex.sh/ping/) for those who want more features and/or don't want to waste the time to save a few bucks :D.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#9From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph. Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don't have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren't dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your ou…
Yep, plus most engineering time is worth at minimum $60+/h, which would pay for a year or more with most of these services.
Re: Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down
#10The advantage of this type of cloud solution over a one-size-fits-all cloud service like Pingdom (which I use) is flexibility. You can configure cloud agents to perform nearly any task you can envision.