Ask HN: How do you monitor your sideprojects?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392137

by treseck • 4 years ago

32 20 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As the title says: How do you monitor your sideprojects? Not only the financial part, but also technical stuff like online/offline monitoring, service monitoring etc.

Do you use certain services? IFTTT? Where do you print logs (if at all?). Do you still use Slack or have you switched to another platform like Discord or Telegram?

mason96• 4 years ago

That's the neat part, I don't. Cause my side projects are never completed

rozenmd• 4 years ago

Sentry and Cloudwatch logs mainly, with paging set-up if anything bad happens.

Though I run a status page + uptime monitoring service and also dogfood monitoring my own service (https://onlineornot.com)

plugin-baby• 4 years ago

Thanks for onlineornot.com - great simple service, doing one thing well. I use it, plus Sentry for frontend and backend errors and performance monitoring.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

I just googled for a free uptime monitor and used that. Occasionally get a downtime email.

viraptor• 4 years ago

Errors -> rollbar (free tier)

Website being reachable -> uptime robot

App metrics -> influxdb + grafana on home server, because it's already there and ready

Alerts -> grafana sends messages to telegram so they're received on my phone

Web metrics -> matomo on home server

Logs -> mostly just local, but some remote + home server stuff is logged to loki + grafana

lazyeye• 4 years ago

Created a "health check" web page that does a whole series of checks on page load (free diskspace, db connectivity, email queue etc etc). If no errors then a success keyword is displayed on the page.

UptimeRobot checks the page every 5 mins and if no success keyword I get an email. I can then load the same web page to see the list of status checks to see which failed.

thepra• 4 years ago

I did setup a mongodb database for the logs of all my apps, and built an admin dashboard to look up into it.

rikroots• 4 years ago

My side project is a JS canvas library. I don't monitor it: no logs; no tracking; no service uptime stuff. I do check the GitHub repo daily, just in case someone has wandered in and asked a question (3 questions so far in 2022). In a moment of vanity I did set up a discord channel; I check it weekly or so just to make sure nobody's messed up its pristine state with comments and stuff.

What I do monitor is the competition's GitHub repos. Some of them are a lot busier than my library's repo. Sometimes people ask questions like "how do I do X and/or Y with your library" which leads me to think how X and/or Y can be achieved in my library which sometimes leads to me committing code to solve the ask - just for the heck of it. It helps keep me engaged with the project.

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

Ain't got 2 Gb RAM to spare for Grafana so I use cron jobs and gnuplot to build the shittiest looking replacement.

https://www.marginalia.nu/stats/

https://www.marginalia.nu/status/

(I also run the sites on the motto "89.9999% also has five nines"; so there's that)

is_true• 4 years ago

I would love to see someone slip that 89,9999 on a SLA

toast0• 4 years ago

Personally, I'm a fan of eight eights, because nine nines is a bit excessive.

ezekiell• 4 years ago

I really like your motto! Thanks for sharing it

xrd• 4 years ago

Uptime Kuma runs on dokku. It's great.

conaire• 4 years ago

For small projects I just have all the errors emailed to my inbox, along with the user id.

I then use luckyorange so I can review what the user was doing on the UI to trigger the error.

bravetraveler• 4 years ago

By using them!

I'm not worried about availability beyond being able to personally use them.

I do have a couple of statping instances but it's not that useful

RileyJames• 4 years ago

I use:

- google search console: to monitor any dramatic SEO changes. I don’t monitor ranks, just clicks through from organic results.

- honeybadger.io for errors and uptime. Free tier.

- plausible.io for analytics

Some of my projects are repo / dev related. So I monitor their GitHub repos, and those of competitors. I built a tool to monitor repo growth/stats. Kind of like plausible but for a repo: https://RepoRanks.com

nicbou• 4 years ago

BetterUptime to get notified if it goes down.

I deliberately avoid measuring traffic.

That's all

cbeach• 4 years ago

Matomo for analytics - it has every Google Analytics feature I need. I don’t want to blight my users with a stupid cookie warning (thanks EU GDPR :-/ ) so I self-host it with cookies disabled. https://matomo.org Prometheus, Grafana and Slack for metrics and alerting

8n4vidtmkvmk• 4 years ago

statuscake and uptime robot. on the ones i kinda care about at least.

JoeyBananas• 4 years ago

I have logs on my server but I choose not to check them because I'm afraid I'll have to debug something and I don't feel like doing that

Ask HN: How do you monitor your sideprojects?

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