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Upptime/upptime: Uptime monitor and status page powered by GitHub
- gbourne 4y agoI agree there have been a few GitHub actions issues. We've been getting errors with UppTime error due to GitHub actions failing However, I still think Upptime is amazing! It is simple, under your control, and does the job. Here is a review I wrote a while back on Upptime. https://www.ayrshare.com/upptime-monitor-status-website-api/ https://www.ayrshare.com/upptime-monitor-status-website-api/
- superb-owl 4y agoI love, but also kind of fear, the amount of open infrastructure being built to run specifically on GitHub (and therefore Microsoft's) servers.
- bogota 4y agoI don’t love it. Overall the amount of things now that just boil down to use github/aws/google has really decreased my enjoyment of building projects. Additionally i haven’t seen it provide some huge boost in productivity like everyone likes to assume is happening.
- yourad_io 4y agoSo build them on a VPS?
- andyp-kw 4y agoPart of business continuity is factoring and planning for risks. We plan for the possibility that an earthquake might happen, or the building burns down. By the same merit, if you're locked into a cloud provider or service, it's your responsibility to ensure that there's a plan in place to migrate away if necessary.
- kps 4y agoGiven the recurring recent HN posts about GitHub outages, I thought this was going to be a parody.
- fartcannon 4y agoI think that's probably why its been posted here.. Some schadenfreude.
- Brajeshwar 4y agoThought the same. "Well, who's gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?"
- rozenmd 4y agoAs someone that runs an uptime monitoring service business - you run several replicas of your stack (necessary to stay up during huge outages anyway), and monitor yourself. Monitoring from another vendor helps too.
- jraph 4y agoYou might want to do the opposite and monitor GitHub from your infrastructure instead.
- langsoul-com 4y agoPretty unique way to use github actions for sure.
- aorth 4y agoThe lengths people will go to get free stuff. Technically cool, but I think it's a misuse of GitHub Actions.
- gtirloni 4y agoIt's also against their ToS.
- iRomain 4y agoPretty cool! But, before you jump into it... Unless Github have changed their terms, this is against the ToS of Github actions. If I recall correctly, they are meant to be used for building/testing/maintaining the project included in the repo.
- majkinetor 4y agoIsn't this maintaining?
- harg 4y agoGenerally it’ll be used for monitoring uptime of another project. So even if that falls under “maintaining” it wouldn’t be for the project “in the repository”, unless you somehow combine upptime into the repo of the project you’re monitoring. But that could get very messy.
- fnord123 4y agoYou can use `git checkout --orphan gh-pages` to make a branch with no parent commit. Put the upptime stuff there and maybe it just works in the same project. I haven't tried upptime, so ymmv.
- majkinetor 4y agoThat is irrelevant. Project to repository mapping is arbitrary.
- dkobia 4y agoAlso, GitHub actions is not necessarily free. There is a $0.008/minute fee for every run. You just don’t think about it because you have minutes included in your current plan. This tool runs every 5 minutes which by my math equates to ~8640 runs/month. GitHub’s free edition has 2000 minutes/month. You can see how this might actually be great for GitHub’s bottom line.
- anandchowdhary 4y ago
- sleepyxuras91 4y agoSure it's already been done but I'm sure a similar thing could be made on Azure Functions well within the free tier per month. Can also host static web apps for free or even have GUIs served by the functions themselves. And as people stated before this seems a gross miss use of GitHub Actions. Whereas at least the above outlines a solution Microsoft actively encourages.
- whitepirate20 4y agoI feel like people are overstating this as gross misuse to be honest. Curling some http based endpoints on a CRON isn’t really a gross misuse of actions. There are a million ways to do this. I could also tell you using Azure functions and having a dependency on Microsoft is overly complex for something that could be done with collectD and cron built into the OS on most VPSs
- gtirloni 4y agoThe ToS explicitly mentions this as being forbidden.
- rozenmd 4y agoI built my own version entirely within AWS Lambda's free tier, works well until you're into "continuously running serverless" territory - at that point any random VM would be significantly cheaper.
- indigodaddy 4y agoOCI free tier would be good for this sort of thing.. their free tier is pretty nuts. You can have Ampere 4 OCPU + 24G RAM + 200G block storage spread across 1-4 instances. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
- rozenmd 4y agoYeah that's pretty wild. I managed to fit my entire serverless stack (roughly 1.2m checks per week) into 2x 256MB VMs and 1x 512MB VM, you could run a monster server on that.
- bongobingo1 4y agoAFAIK "5 minute crons" on GHA are "best effort" and may run anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes, and are also subject to some kind of "couldn't find a worker in time" skip/cancellation rules.
- anandchowdhary 4y agoMaker here. Yes, this became a common-enough problem for me to write a small post: https://upptime.js.org/blog/2021/01/22/github-actions-schedule-not-working/ https://upptime.js.org/blog/2021/01/22/github-actions-schedu.... Some people tried with self-hosted runners on Actions [1], but that turned out not to be much better. [1] https://github.com/upptime/upptime/issues/42 https://github.com/upptime/upptime/issues/42
- anandchowdhary 4y agoMaker here. AMA! Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25553445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25553445 (301 points, 82 comments)
- preya2k 4y agoI’ve tried it probably a year ago for a couple of weeks. It was very unreliable and slow for me. Change in uptime status were not picked up very fast and sometimes not at all. Should I give it another try?
- anandchowdhary 4y agoIn that case, I would say no. Not much has changed in the past few weeks, and GitHub Actions has become increasingly less reliable (i.e., wait times are higher than when we launched Upptime a year ago). We're exploring a new CLI approach [1] which has the benefit of still running on GitHub Actions scheduled workflows and all bells and whistles like Slack notifications and opening issues, but it can be fully self-hosted with just a CLI command, and will always run in the background. Plus, it'll support GitLab and really any git repository and more status website features. When that's ready, perhaps that would be a better fit. [1] https://github.com/upptime/cli https://github.com/upptime/cli
- neurostimulant 4y agoDo you have any plan to port this to gitlab in case github ban these kind of use?
- anandchowdhary 4y agoMaker here. From another comment: > We're exploring a new CLI approach [1] which has the benefit of still running on GitHub Actions scheduled workflows and all bells and whistles like Slack notifications and opening issues, but it can be fully self-hosted with just a CLI command, and will always run in the background. Plus, it'll support GitLab and really any git repository and more status website features. When that's ready, perhaps that would be a better fit. [1] https://github.com/upptime/cli https://github.com/upptime/cli
- whitepirate20 4y agoCool. Maybe cloudflare workers would be better than using GitHub actions? Regardless of the hate on GitHub availability and the potential misuse of actions, it’s a very nice landing page and unique idea. I also ran a Cron based pipeline on Gitlab once to execute some shell scripts and it worked well! Cheers
- majkinetor 4y agoI love it. Its simple, natural and intuitive. It would be great if you offer the same workflow on GitLab. Its scheduled pipelines default to 10 minutes, but on premise installations allow it to be set to run every minute. [1] [1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/schedules.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/schedules.html
- zeisss 4y agoIs this relying on scheduled github actions? We are using those and they are not very accurate. We regularly see jobs completely skipped or run with a lot of delay.
- oefrha 4y agoIt does rely on schedule. https://github.com/upptime/upptime/blob/c203e2fd45da62963d16d20ddca943e40e6013f6/.github/workflows/uptime.yml#L12 https://github.com/upptime/upptime/blob/c203e2fd45da62963d16... And yes, schedule is terribly unreliable. 1h+ delays are routine, 3h+ delays have been observed, high frequency jobs are skipped all the time. You have to use an external trigger (that is to say, triggering the workflow_dispatch event through the API) for reliable scheduling.
- oefrha 4y agoGitHub Actions has really poor uptime itself. I have an action that is triggered every minute to check with an external API and update data & rebuild site as necessary; the number of times the action fails every month because the initial git checkout or some other internal thing fails is high. Occasionally things get spotty for half an hour or so at a time even though status is all green.
- perryizgr8 4y agoThis is very easy to setup and use. Github actions work very well. However, Github seems to consider the cron schedule for actions to be a suggestion, instead of the timer you would expect it to be. As a result it is not uncommon for you to find that more than 20 minutes have elapsed between subsequent status checks. I solved it by triggering Github actions using an external cron job on a server.
- KronisLV 4y agoSome people have stated that GitHub Actions (or even GitLab CI) might now have an uptime as good as you'd expect for something like this, while others have brought ToS into the question and whether this is okay to do. On that note, I feel like this is probably a fun and clever hack, though might also cause problems if it would happen at too large a scale, much like people tried mining crypto in CI a while ago, which was really problematic. But then that leaves another question: what is everyone using for uptime monitoring? A cloud service of some sort? Self-hosted software in a different region/VPS provider with some alerting integrations? My current setup is pretty boring, but I figured I'd share nonetheless: - for uptime monitoring itself, I use Uptime Kuma: https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma - it's a reasonably simple and lightweight piece of software, with nice alerting capabilities - I have it hooked up to a self-hosted Mattermost instance for alerting, with the app on my phone - should the instance or the server itself fail, I have a separate solution to monitor the infrastructure itself - for infrastructure monitoring, I use Zabbix: https://www.zabbix.com/ - Zabbix will send me alerts to my e-mail (also self-hosted) should any issues become apparent - I use Let's Encrypt, Caddy/Nginx/Apache (depends) and also containers where applicable: Swarm/Nomad/K3s (depends) - storage uses bind mounts and DNS records use CNAME, so I can easily move stuff around Some of the aspects might be old fashioned, I know that people really enjoy Prometheus and Grafana, but personally it all seems to work decently - even if Zabbix for example is a bit old fashioned, it has a pretty sane monitoring setup out of the box (using Zabbix agent in a passive configuration).
- majkinetor 4y ago> I know that people really enjoy Prometheus and Grafana, but personally it all seems to work decently Those are for hard core metrics - not for status metrics which are trivial and you have only couple of them. When you have thousands of metrics, uptime kuma and bunch of friends wont help you. Detailed App/Infra metrics can also run on your own infrastructure unlike status pages that should use something independent. In your case, if your local mattermost fails, you will get 0 notifications. It doesn't even have to fail, its enough that your company Internet stops working (like it happened to me today, 20 + services were not available, including local statping [1] instance) > even if Zabbix for example is a bit old fashioned, Its not a problem that it is old fashioned but that it is harder then it needs to be - compared for example to telegraf/influxdb/grafana its setup on both sides is far from trivial. With influxdb, I can send metrics even from PowerShell scripts with 0 effort [2]. [1]: https://github.com/statping/statping https://github.com/statping/statping [2]: https://github.com/majkinetor/psinflux https://github.com/majkinetor/psinflux
- yuriko 4y agoBased on the reliability of GitHub Actions, the status page can suffer quite a significant downtime as well...