I’ve been using the free uptime robot service for a while, but I need something more legit now.
I’d like to know what others that have websites are using to notify them that their sites are down.
I’ve heard about https://icinga.com and https://www.dynatrace.com
Just wondering what others are using?
Is that what you’re using, @samRowlands ?
What do you think of their service?
I wonder if I could use bandwidth monitoring somehow to determine that the site was down?
Like if the CPU activity or bandwidth is BELOW a certain threshold or something…
I am not currently using anything. I need it to monitor the .htaccess file. So I’m thinking to build my own solution.
Don’t build your own when you can use something. I use a free plan from Uptime Doctor.
Me as well. Since I’ll be running redundant servers, I was thinking about a little cron job or something that runs on each server that checks the other servers. Since it’s not likely that all will die simultaneously, then I would get a notification from the other when there’s an issue.
Curious though if I could use the monitoring as a way to also tell if the server has stopped responding.
Where are you running the servers? I use EC2 and CloudWatch to reboot the server if it gets stuck in the infamous Web Framework Eats 100% CPU trap.
Digital Ocean.
When I looked into monitoring for Digital Ocean it needed you to have a second instance to actually do the monitoring. It would also need API access to your Digital Ocean account to perform droplet actions based on the monitoring. I passed on that for CloudWatch.
My needs were specifically to watch out for that Xojo Web 100% CPU bug. I monitor for CPU activity if > 70% for a period of 5 minutes, CloudWatch will reboot the instance. This is probably a little different than the needs of a normal website “is it down” monitor.
I’m using both uptime robot (which is nice and simple, monitoring a web service response) as well as https://www.site24x7.com which offers a limited number of free monitors, SMS notification (though for some reason it’s not working) and emails when something isn’t working - it offers quite a good status page too (example here) that you can include in your site so people can check for themselves.
Y’know… It’s been YEARs that I’ve been using uptime robot and I hadn’t been to the website in probably 10 years or more. I just assumed it wasn’t that good, but you know, even the free service hasn’t failed me so I just added some more sites and it’s good to go. Not sure where I got it in my head that they were not “pro” enough. They are actually great!
Might update to their paid plan if I need to get the SMS or less-than-5-minute checks in the future!