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This was in response to the feedback we've received and requests to open source the project. The original post was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48

This was in response to the feedback we've received and requests to open source the project. The original post was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812222 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812222 Happy to field any questions :)

gacba 14y ago
Great post--I can use this exact setup with my AWS server and was about to start writing something similar. Thanks for saving me loads of time.
- mahmoudimus 14y ago
  Absolutely! Feel free to shoot an email (in my profile) if you need help setting it up. We're also on irc.freenode.net #balanced
huhtenberg 14y ago
Have you looked at anything else but Pingdom? It has nice visuals and free trials, but it's a relative newcomer to the market of the monitoring services and they also have a tendency to keep things simpler than they need to be. Something more mature and enterprisey, like RedAlert, would fit the bill.
- mjallday 14y ago
  We looked at a few other solutions like ServerDensity etc. The main issue was that we wanted to report across all requests, e.g. there is no single health check endpoint that an external system can hit to determine if everything is OK or not. The crux of the matter is that we needed to parse our Nginx logs for the response code on every single request and calculate the uptime from that.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    I may be missing something, but checking your logs does not fulfill exactly the same function as an external check. I mean, if X% of your requests never make it to the logs cause ELB is messed up/dns is fucked up/disk is full/nginx dies/grasshoppers then you'd happily show that everything is ok, since no new 500 status gets pulled from the logs. So internal and external checks should be compounded, imo.
    - mjallday 14y ago
      That's a great point, we've created an issue to track this on Github - https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com/issues/1 https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com/issu... PS - Pull requests with solutions get free t-shirts :)
- amatix 14y ago
  Over 6 years (July 2006 according to archive.org) is a 'relative newcomer'? You're hard to please :) Their API took a long time to arrive, but we've used it for disabling checks during maintenance events pretty effectively. As mentioned in the article, POST/PUT requests are on the list of Things I Want though. Would be good to be able to group a bunch of checks together into a service too.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    Pingdom really started to develop into its current form around 2009 I think. Before that it might've existed, but I don't think it was aggressively marketed and developed.

gacba 14y ago

Great post--I can use this exact setup with my AWS server and was about to start writing something similar. Thanks for saving me loads of time.

mahmoudimus 14y ago
Absolutely! Feel free to shoot an email (in my profile) if you need help setting it up. We're also on irc.freenode.net #balanced

huhtenberg 14y ago

Have you looked at anything else but Pingdom? It has nice visuals and free trials, but it's a relative newcomer to the market of the monitoring services and they also have a tendency to keep things simpler than they need to be. Something more mature and enterprisey, like RedAlert, would fit the bill.

mjallday 14y ago
We looked at a few other solutions like ServerDensity etc. The main issue was that we wanted to report across all requests, e.g. there is no single health check endpoint that an external system can hit to determine if everything is OK or not. The crux of the matter is that we needed to parse our Nginx logs for the response code on every single request and calculate the uptime from that.
- riffraff 14y ago
  I may be missing something, but checking your logs does not fulfill exactly the same function as an external check. I mean, if X% of your requests never make it to the logs cause ELB is messed up/dns is fucked up/disk is full/nginx dies/grasshoppers then you'd happily show that everything is ok, since no new 500 status gets pulled from the logs. So internal and external checks should be compounded, imo.
  - mjallday 14y ago
    That's a great point, we've created an issue to track this on Github - https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com/issues/1 https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com/issu... PS - Pull requests with solutions get free t-shirts :)
amatix 14y ago
Over 6 years (July 2006 according to archive.org) is a 'relative newcomer'? You're hard to please :) Their API took a long time to arrive, but we've used it for disabling checks during maintenance events pretty effectively. As mentioned in the article, POST/PUT requests are on the list of Things I Want though. Would be good to be able to group a bunch of checks together into a service too.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Pingdom really started to develop into its current form around 2009 I think. Before that it might've existed, but I don't think it was aggressively marketed and developed.