8 ms·

Kinda-sorta-related: 10 years ago this month, I quit my job to finish my first product: a server monitoring system that I ultimately never launched. I did a lit

by chops 13y ago

Kinda-sorta-related: 10 years ago this month, I quit my job to finish my first product: a server monitoring system that I ultimately never launched. I did a little writeup of it earlier this year: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/esonar-resurrection http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/esonar-resurrection So every time I see a post, ad or anything about server monitoring systems, it makes me smile. It's one of those projects that everyone has: "One of these days, I'll work on it."

Theodores 13y ago
Me too! I will tell you why... The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own. With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance). As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page). Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out. A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night. Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats. If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.

by chops 13y ago

Theodores 13y ago

Me too! I will tell you why... The off the shelf services will only get you so far, even with keyword search. Sometimes you just have to roll your own. With a complex ecommerce build you can run into situations where something has gone badly wrong with the pricing, e.g. everything is marked up as on sale, price £0.00. With a roll your own solution you can build an XML tree of the document, go through your HTML tags and put in some rules to make sure that all the prices are greater than zero (for instance). As for keywords, you want something on the page in the footer, however, that can change. Eventually I ended up using the content between the <noscript> tags as that really did not change (even though they were at the top of the page). Sending out an SMS is not hard to do, however, now that people have email on the phone it is not really that useful plus your credits can run out. A 'roll your own' solution with advanced content checks can be used with a standard 'Uptime Robot' type of service. Clients can have the 'Uptime Robot' and manage it themselves, they will get great peace of mind. Meanwhile, the homebrew check can give a developer a heads up on things going wrong before they go wrong (as far as the client is concerned) and pick up on more subtle failings that a client really doesn't need to be told about at odd hours of the night. Depending on your traffic levels you may also want to remember to take the IP address of your check program out of your stats. If anyone does want a very simple PHP script to iterate over a list of URL's (and their respective search strings), do the CURL thing and some DOM parsing, with SMS mailout of whatever the 50x fail is then I can find you one.