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Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your websites?
I'm looking for a simple service that sends me an email or text message if a website goes down. Any suggestions?
- jacquesm 17y agoNagios and Monit Monit after a tip here, great little program.
- warp 17y agoDid you see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903589 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903589 ? I'm not familiar with that service btw, just remembered seeing that here a few days ago. I use nagios both at home and at work.
- matthewking 17y agoI use pingdom, it runs on remote servers where locally run systems will fail if your datacenter loses its internet connection etc. Can't fault it but ignore the response times, I think the pingdom servers are just slow ;)
- EGF 17y agoPingdom - use it on quite a number of projects and they keep adding more data checks around the world making it even better to triangulate back to where and why people are having problems.
- petervandijck 17y agopingdom too. Mostly for response times, thaat's much more interesting to me than uptime.
- spencerfry 17y agoWe use Pingdom also.
- alecco 17y agoPriced at 2x-4x of a web hosting plan? No alternate DNS management? Crazy.
- bentlegen 17y ago$9.95/mo is 2x-4x the price of a web hosting plan? There's also a free plan if you're just monitoring one website.
- alecco 17y agoIf you pre-pay 3 months or a year a good web hosting costs $4.5-7/month, with cronjobs, and plenty of space where you can store regular offsite backups. An almost trivial one-liner with curl can do this kind of service.
- apsurd 17y agobut this is HN, not godaddy user forums.
- alecco 17y agoExactly. Setting up a cronjob to monitor and test your web application (be it Cloud, VPS, or dedicated) should be something everybody here can do with eyes closed or at least ask. Paying a pinger service sounds idiotic unless I'm missing something from that service. I'm surprised it even exists.
- moe 17y agoIf your site is small enough to run on a $7 webhosting plan then you probably don't need monitoring.
- rajuvegesna 17y agohttp://site24x7.com http://site24x7.com
- johng 17y agoPingdom here as well. I think it could stand to be quite a bit cheaper but it works well.
- dlsspy 17y agoI wrote this thing for myself: http://dustin.github.com/whatsup/ http://dustin.github.com/whatsup/
- carl_ 17y agoPingdom with email2sms gateway for external/global checks and zabbix for internal checks
- aneesh 17y agohttp://mon.itor.us/ http://mon.itor.us/ It sends you an email when a site goes down. The free version pings every 20 minutes or so.
- mcav 17y agoI've got a few users who skype me and e-mail me as soon as the site goes down. Not what you're looking for, but alas, that's what I use for now.
- DenisM 17y agoDoes anyone know of a monitor that validates entire pages? I want to make sure that my site was not defaced so I would like to compute and compare hash values for a set of files.
- cracell 17y agoHmm. So I've been writing an uptime monitor and this is an interesting idea. How would you update the hash and how would you handle dynamic content? If the service offered this feature via API seems like a lot of work on the user end.
- DenisM 17y agoThe site is AJAX so all files (HTML, JS) are static. I am perfectly fine copy-pasting the hashes manually each time I roll out the new version, like this file: file1.html 123112 scripts/script1.js 333222 scripts/script2.js 444555 The dynamic part of the site comes from a database, but there is no logic in it - only code, and thus possibility to inject malicious sctript, odd behavior or offensive visual through hacking the web site is vastly reduced by verifying hashes and alerting me about any changes.
- niels 17y agohttp://wasitup.com http://wasitup.com
- crxnamja 17y agopingdom.com
- techiferous 17y agoHas anybody used http://www.howsthe.com http://www.howsthe.com or http://www.aremysitesup.com http://www.aremysitesup.com ?
- colinplamondon 17y agoPingdom, with NewRelic for more detailed monitoring. That way when a customer emails in with a specific issue we can see what went wrong at a glance.
- stanleydrew 17y agocloudkick for my slicehost and ec2 instances.
- cmelbye 17y agoCloudKick also, very nice for some general, free monitors with email notifications.
- spudlyo 17y agocheck_http, one of the stock plugins for nagios.
- moomerman 17y agoI'm working on http://nimbu.net/ http://nimbu.net/ at the moment that does what you're looking for. I've just added twitter alerts too if you use twitter. If you've got anything specific you would want to monitor then please let me know.
- techiferous 17y agoI've got lots of little sites that I'd like to monitor but that aren't that important and aren't making money. So I'm looking for a tool that has a free option but when one of my apps grows into a serious product I can start paying for more services. For the free service, I'm looking for something that would notify me by email and SMS if the site is down or slow (within about an hour). So far it looks like http://aremysitesup.com/premium/ http://aremysitesup.com/premium/ can do this. Pingdom is way too expensive for my needs right now. I would love to support a fellow Hacker News reader. Does your app fit my needs?
- moomerman 17y agoYeah, nimbu.net does do what you're asking for and it will always be free for one site. You will get notifications by email and/or SMS and/or twitter within minutes of your site going down. The SMS option won't always be free, but you can send via Twitter and then get Twitter to SMS you for a free option. Edit: I just re-read about having lots of little sites. I will consider a reduced-functionality (eg. as you say within the hour notification) but allowing more free sites as an option.
- jackowayed 17y ago"always free for 1 site" seems like a bad call. unless you have a ridiculous number of sites, is it really that much work to make a different account for each site, either with different emails or using a gmail/google apps email and putting a different +whatever in your address? I would guess that your rate of paying customers will be pretty low.
- 17y ago
- chadr 17y agoPingdom for site uptime & paging, munin for capacity planning and performance monitoring, and monit for process monitoring.
- daleharvey 17y agoI have been meaning to try out http://boxedice.com http://boxedice.com
- jzting 17y agohttp://www.montastic.com http://www.montastic.com
- brixon 17y agoWe use what used to be called IPCheck. http://www.paessler.com/prtg http://www.paessler.com/prtg You can run this with 10 sensors for free.
- stuntgoat 17y agoWhy not write a script that checks the site from a cron job on a different server. You can have it send an email or text via twitter. Cron is a simple service. And if you can write a script that emails you or your phone, you only need to place it on a very reliable server or 2. I wrote a script, run via cron, that checked a ticket web page every 30 minutes for concert ticket availability. If the text changed, it implied that the tickets were available; the script sent an email to my phone, a text message, telling me call for tickets. ( Ratatat was the band )
- techiferous 17y agoThe thought crossed my mind when I saw pingdom's prices.
- joevandyk 17y agopingdom checks your site from multiple servers all over the world. they provide great uptime and response time graphs. lot more than a one line script can do via a cronjob.
- JangoSteve 17y agoI use http://aremysitesup.com/ http://aremysitesup.com/. I think I may have even heard about it on HN when they launched.
- barmstrong 17y agoI use monit on my linux boxes. It requires some setup but the big advantage of this is that it can not only tell you when your site is down, but sometimes ACTUALLY FIX IT by restarting nginx or whatever you need it to do. This is something a monitoring service can't do since they don't have access to your box. Of course it's not going to be able to fix all situations that could cause downtime, but if it hits a scenario you anticipated it will.
- andrewtj 17y agoDon't use it to the exclusion of external tools though. monit doesn't help if the server has no connectivity or no power. On a similar tangent, configuring a mutual restart policy (eg: if cron fails monit restarts it and vice versa) is also a good idea.
- moe 17y agoActually automatic countermeasures are almost always a bad idea. Don't do it. If a service crashes repeatedly then fix the service, don't deploy bandaids. Those bandaids tend to pile up and god help you when that pile comes crashing down...
- andrewtj 17y agoYou're ascribing a social phenomena to a technical implementation.
- truebosko 17y agoI use http://sucuri.net/ http://sucuri.net/ for a very simple up/down, content changed notification system. It tracks those as well as DNS, HTTP Certs and a few more. It's also free :)
- techiferous 17y agoWow, that seems like a great service for completely free! I assume you've had a good experience with them? How long have you used their services and how many web sites do you monitor?
- truebosko 17y agoI've been using them for about 6 months? I only monitor three websites that all together get about 2k uniques a day so nothing major. Never had any problems and you can customize some of the notices down to the line, which is nice.
- dylanz 17y agohttp://www.dotcom-monitor.com/ http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/
- dugmartin 17y agowormly.com
- rsanders 17y agoWormly is great not just for showing whether something's up, but what's been going on with it. I use it like a hosted Cacti for my host and MySQL performance measurement. Very nice.
- timtrueman 17y agohttp://chartbeat.com/ http://chartbeat.com/ I can't describe in words how awesome this service is for just $10/month.
- kvs 17y agoSame here. Good one to monitor user interaction and flow in real-time. I also like the replay.
- joevandyk 17y agoi use nagios to monitor a lot of sites. there's also montastic.
- latortuga 17y agoWe use pingdom and pagerduty (they launched on here I think, not sure if they're YC funded though) and are pretty happy with both.
- thesethings 17y agoI use cloudkick.com, which is a hosted service. It's the most accurate hosted monitoring I've ever used. Less false positives than any other hosted service I've used, and the fastest (accurate) notifications of true issues. The catch? You have to be using one of the hosts they cover (currently EC2, EC2 Europe, Rackspace, Slicehost.). They will probably add a bunch more soon, as they are organizers of the libcloud project, which aims to build interfaces for all popular providers. Code checked in so far covers Linode, vps.net, vCloud Express, for example. (http://libcloud.org/ http://libcloud.org/) It's easy to install because you don't have to install any agents on your system. You just plug in your (provider) key at the friendly, easy Cloudkick dashboard, et voila. All the accuracy of agented monitoring, none of the mess/packages/server set-up. (Lots of hosted monitoring services act like "agentless" monitoring, which means not that accurate or fast to notice things.) Also, it's free. (Though it seems like they may have premium services one day.)
- wowfactor 17y agoI use the Website Hack detector http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-detect-if-your-webserver-is-hacked-and-get-alerted/ http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-detect-if-your-web... with another program called site up. It is easy & quick to setup.
- dedalus 17y agowww.watchmouse.com
- sucuri2 17y agoI will recommend http://sucuri.net http://sucuri.net Not only it monitors if your site is down, but also if it has been blacklisted, defaced, etc.
- sucuri2 17y agoand it is free... :) forgot to add that.
- DenisM 17y agoI would be more likely to use it if it was paid - if I am relying on it I would rather be sure you have a reason to stick around. Also your site is lite on details - makes a lot of claims about protecting this or that without any explanation on how this protection is achieved. How do you validate integrity of the content? Do you compute and compare hashes of all files? Also, you should list the world-wide locations you are checking from.