Ask HN: Website monitoring tool that will wake me up when site is down?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40197100

6 9 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi.

I'm looking for a tool that will open my website every minute. When the site goes down, it needs to send an alert to my iPhone that will pierce through possibly enabled sleep/silent mode.

I'm using Uptime Kuma + pushover currently and on critical alert level it will make the phone vibrate every couple of seconds until I wake up and click "Acknowledge notification", but I might sleep through vibrations, so I'm looking for something louder/more reliable.

Thanks

LinuxBender• 2 years ago

In my experience the most common tool is Nagios [0]. Core is free

- Most of the common checks one may want to do site up/down, certificate expiring, service up/down, etc... are built in and just have to be populated with the domain to check. Additional checks can be done if the NRPE agent is installed on the server. Wherever you run Nagios from would need to be able to send an email to your phone. There are newer and fancier tools than Nagios, but having been around a very long time it has a lot of capability built in and most bugs worked out. Nagios will also provide you with historical data.

I believe there is an iPhone Nagios app [1] that can log into your Nagios instance and give you alerts. An alternate option is to use SMTP to get the alerts. I do not know which would drain the battery less. It only has 2 stars so maybe it is awful, I don't know.

I don't know anything about iPhones but if your email client has the capability of setting up a rule to use a non-standard message alert tone based on subject or sender that is how I would get the noise. Some people set it up to send text messages but then you need a SMS provider for Nagios to send to. If not maybe there is a email client you can buy from them that does all this. You may have to shorten the interval at which your email client checks for messages. > > >This is probably where the focus should be rather than my long winded reply, an email client that has rule capabilities and different tones by subject or sender.< < <

- An even simpler setup would just be using curl to check a status page that either returns OK, overloaded, or just times out if the site is down and then email or text you if anything other than OK shows up in your defined curl timeout. This could be done in bash, python or whatever you want to drive curl or libcurl with. Also send alerts to a local logfile or syslog using logger so you have historical data.

- Another route to possibly go would be to look for a phone app that tries to reach a web page and makes a noise if it can't but then you may be losing sleep any time your phone has issues reaching the site and that may be entirely unrelated to your server and its network provider. Sleep is important too.

- Another option would be to use one of the paid monitoring sites that will also email you but most of them would be overpriced for just watching one server. I suppose that depends on your priorities. Research them before using, some have had serious security issues with customer info/data.

[0] https://www.nagios.org/downloads/ Scroll down to the free Nagios Core

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/server-alarms-nagios-client/id...

Grimeton• 2 years ago

while true; do if ! curl -f "${url}"; then for i in {1..10}; do sipcmd ....; sleep 60; done; fi; sleep 60; done

Let it dial your phone and add the dialer's number to the list of allowed numbers that can pierce the silent mode.

rozenmd• 2 years ago

This kinda sounds like the tool I built: OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com)

It sends reminder alerts over email and SMS (and phone calls soon) until the incident is resolved.

It also integrates with PagerDuty/Opsgenie/Incident.io if you want something a bit more heavy duty.

KomoD• 2 years ago

but I might sleep through vibrations, so I'm looking for something louder/more reliable.

Would setting a notification sound work? Looks like pushover allows you to do that

fuckgoogleplay• 2 years ago

well I also get a bunch of non-critical notifications on pushover, so just doing this would mess with my sleep

there• 2 years ago

Pushover allows per-message sound settings, so you could configure just alerts from your monitoring to play a sound and send at priority 2 which will bypass your device's quiet settings and repeat to wake you up.

https://pushover.net/api#sounds

https://pushover.net/api#priority2

mtmail• 2 years ago

statuscake.com has a feature to call your phone number. It's a USA phone (+1) and robotic voice "Your website <URL> is down" but for me it's the loudest alert I have.

BorisMelnik• 2 years ago

what you need is a programmable siren...or more redundancy :)

Gustomaximus• 2 years ago

I use https://uptimerobot.com/

They have a call option and a bunch of others.

Ask HN: Website monitoring tool that will wake me up when site is down?

Related Stories