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You can get free uptime monitoring from Google Cloud. The limit is 100 uptime checks per monitoring scope, which may mean either a project or an organization ba

by bdd 4y ago

You can get free uptime monitoring from Google Cloud. The limit is 100 uptime checks per monitoring scope, which may mean either a project or an organization based on how you configure IIUC. https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks. The checks are ran from 6 locations around the world, so you can also catch network issues, that you likely cannot do much about when you're running a tiny service. My uptime checks show the probes come from: usa-{virginia,oregon,iowa}, eur-belgium, apac-singapore, sa-brazil-sao_paulo Another neat monitoring thing I rely on is https://healthchecks.io https://healthchecks.io. Anything that needs to run periodically checks in with the API at the start and the end of execution so you can be sure they are running as they should, on time, and without errors. Its free tier allows 20 checks.

jacooper 4y ago
What is the interval for the checks ? Its written that its 100 per metric scope, but I don't know what that means really.(2) Also there seems to be no status monitor page ? 2- https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks
- bdd 4y ago
  Metrics scope is the logical grouping of assets you are monitoring. Explained in detail here https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/settings https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/settings along with a video. Web console allows check intervals of 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes.
tedmiston 4y ago
New Relic also offers a similar uptime monitoring with a generous free tier via their Synthetics service. https://newrelic.com/platform/synthetics https://newrelic.com/platform/synthetics
- packetslave 4y ago
  I wish New Relic would support plain old ICMP ping. That would be nice. You used to be able to implement it using their Scripted API thing (which is just sandboxed Node), but at some point they broke raw socket support, which broke every ping NPM in existence. I think you can still make it work if you run a private minion, but that's more effort than I want to spend.
  - teh_klev 4y ago
    > but at some point they broke raw socket support Sockets are a transport layer feature e.g. TCP or UDP. ICMP works at the network layer and has no notion of sockets.
    - dgl 4y ago
      The BSD socket API on many systems implements a raw socket type[1], so you can use the socket APIs to talk raw IP. Some systems (Linux, Darwin) also implement a special icmp socket type which can allow unprivileged ping. [1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ip.7.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ip.7.html
    - oasisbob 4y ago
      Regardless of what layer ICMP works at, its traffic is still transmitted using datagrams, and the call to do so is socket(), yes? Are you just trying to point out the misnomer?
yawgmoth 4y ago
Continuing the tooling thread: the free tier of https://www.uptimetoolbox.com/ https://www.uptimetoolbox.com/ is quite good.
ydant 4y ago
healthchecks.io is a great service (and apparently can be self-hosted - https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks) that I use for both personal projects and at work. It works really well for cron jobs - while it works with a single call, you can also call a /start and finished endpoint and get extra insights such as runtime for your jobs. It would be nice if it had slightly more complex alerting rules available - for example, a "this service should run successfully at least once every X hours, but is fine to fail multiple times otherwise" type alert. We wanted to use it for monitoring some periodic downloads (like downloading partners' reports), and the expectation is the call will often time out or fail or have no data to download, which is technically a "failure", but only if it goes on for more than a day. Since healtchecks.io doesn't really support this, we ended up writing our own "stale data" monitoring logic and alerting inside the downloader, and just use healtchecks.io to monitor the script not crashing.
- amzans 4y ago
  Healthchecks is a great service! Not sure if you tried it too but https://cronitor.io/ https://cronitor.io/ supports more complex alerting rules like the one you describe. As a bonus, you can also create uptime checks and status pages under the same roof. Full-disclosure: I work at Cronitor, happy to help if you have any questions :)
- cuu508 4y ago
  > "this service should run successfully at least once every X hours, but is fine to fail multiple times otherwise" This should work if you set the period to "X hours", and send success signals only, no failure signals. In that case, as long as the gap between the success signals is below X hours, all is well. When there's been no success signal for more than X hours, Healthchecks sends out alerts. I'm guessing you probably also want to log failures using the /fail endpoint. And, the problem is, when Healthchecks receives a failure event, it sends out alerts immediately. One potential feature I'm considering is a new "/log" endpoint. When a client pings this endpoint, Healthchecks would treat it as neither a success nor a failure, and just log the received data. You could then use this endpoint in place of /fail. Just logging the failure would not cause any immediate alerts. But the information would be there for inspection, when X hours passes with no success signals and you eventually do get alerted. How does that sound?

by bdd 4y ago

jacooper 4y ago

What is the interval for the checks ? Its written that its 100 per metric scope, but I don't know what that means really.(2) Also there seems to be no status monitor page ? 2- https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/uptime-checks

bdd 4y ago
Metrics scope is the logical grouping of assets you are monitoring. Explained in detail here https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/settings https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/settings along with a video. Web console allows check intervals of 1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes.

tedmiston 4y ago

New Relic also offers a similar uptime monitoring with a generous free tier via their Synthetics service. https://newrelic.com/platform/synthetics https://newrelic.com/platform/synthetics

packetslave 4y ago
I wish New Relic would support plain old ICMP ping. That would be nice. You used to be able to implement it using their Scripted API thing (which is just sandboxed Node), but at some point they broke raw socket support, which broke every ping NPM in existence. I think you can still make it work if you run a private minion, but that's more effort than I want to spend.
- teh_klev 4y ago
  > but at some point they broke raw socket support Sockets are a transport layer feature e.g. TCP or UDP. ICMP works at the network layer and has no notion of sockets.
  - dgl 4y ago
    The BSD socket API on many systems implements a raw socket type[1], so you can use the socket APIs to talk raw IP. Some systems (Linux, Darwin) also implement a special icmp socket type which can allow unprivileged ping. [1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ip.7.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ip.7.html
  - oasisbob 4y ago
    Regardless of what layer ICMP works at, its traffic is still transmitted using datagrams, and the call to do so is socket(), yes? Are you just trying to point out the misnomer?

yawgmoth 4y ago

Continuing the tooling thread: the free tier of https://www.uptimetoolbox.com/ https://www.uptimetoolbox.com/ is quite good.

ydant 4y ago

healthchecks.io is a great service (and apparently can be self-hosted - https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks) that I use for both personal projects and at work. It works really well for cron jobs - while it works with a single call, you can also call a /start and finished endpoint and get extra insights such as runtime for your jobs. It would be nice if it had slightly more complex alerting rules available - for example, a "this service should run successfully at least once every X hours, but is fine to fail multiple times otherwise" type alert. We wanted to use it for monitoring some periodic downloads (like downloading partners' reports), and the expectation is the call will often time out or fail or have no data to download, which is technically a "failure", but only if it goes on for more than a day. Since healtchecks.io doesn't really support this, we ended up writing our own "stale data" monitoring logic and alerting inside the downloader, and just use healtchecks.io to monitor the script not crashing.

amzans 4y ago
Healthchecks is a great service! Not sure if you tried it too but https://cronitor.io/ https://cronitor.io/ supports more complex alerting rules like the one you describe. As a bonus, you can also create uptime checks and status pages under the same roof. Full-disclosure: I work at Cronitor, happy to help if you have any questions :)
cuu508 4y ago
> "this service should run successfully at least once every X hours, but is fine to fail multiple times otherwise" This should work if you set the period to "X hours", and send success signals only, no failure signals. In that case, as long as the gap between the success signals is below X hours, all is well. When there's been no success signal for more than X hours, Healthchecks sends out alerts. I'm guessing you probably also want to log failures using the /fail endpoint. And, the problem is, when Healthchecks receives a failure event, it sends out alerts immediately. One potential feature I'm considering is a new "/log" endpoint. When a client pings this endpoint, Healthchecks would treat it as neither a success nor a failure, and just log the received data. You could then use this endpoint in place of /fail. Just logging the failure would not cause any immediate alerts. But the information would be there for inspection, when X hours passes with no success signals and you eventually do get alerted. How does that sound?