Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs

http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-uptime-monitor/21060/

by blueatlas • 13 years ago

195 51 13 years ago

olegp3• 13 years ago

Why not just use Pingdom which is designed for that?

One thing Docs is good for though is building custom dashboards on a $0 budget. We've got one at https://starthq.com that shows our key metrics and graphs cohorts for the last few weeks.

brennebeck2• 13 years ago

I'd be interested to know more about what you did with dashboards using Docs.

olegp3• 13 years ago

We created a simple API which gives us data ranges such as

- /:start/:end - number of users registered within date range

- /:start/:end/active - number of users registered within date range who were active within last week

etc. etc.

Then it's pretty straightforward to use ImportData & CONCATENATE, as well as fill down to create a matrix of cohorts, which can in turn be graphed.

In general it's best to pull in the raw data with ImportData and then calculate percentages and such in the spreadsheet. The latter are updated when the cells they reference refresh.

Docs refreshes ImportData sources once every hour, caching them in between, so the load on the server and DB is minimal and you end up with more or less current stats.

tlongren2• 13 years ago

Doesn't pingdom allow only one site on their free plan? One benefit of this method is the ability to monitor all your sites.

No, scratch that. You get 10 "checks" with pingdom free.

veritas20• 13 years ago

details?

vault_• 13 years ago

This is pretty cool. The google calendar event to create texts seems like a hack though (even more-so than the rest of it). Is there any reason this couldn't just use the SMS gateways that pretty much every carrier offers?

cmhamill5• 13 years ago

Wow.

To paraphrase Babbage, I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which could lead someone to think this is a good idea.

bradleyland2• 13 years ago

I've been using this for about six months now and it works great. Is there something bad about this that we should all know?

cmhamill5• 13 years ago

"Bad" is probably a strong word. But issues are:

1. Reliance on Google Docs' uptime. While any monitoring service will in theory present the same problem, you're putting all your eggs in one basket.

2. It's just the wrong tool for the job. Install and learn Nagios or Zabbix or what-have-you. If you're worried about uptime, get a couple VPSes from different providers and run your monitors from both.

There's nothing utterly horrifying about it technically, but I just can't imagine how one comes up with this answer to the question of monitoring services.

vidyesh2• 13 years ago

I faced a issue because of which I am not able to stop the monitoring now.

And its very unreliable. So it spams me despite all my efforts to remove it.

I finally made a new filter and archive all notifications.

leokun2• 13 years ago

Right, like which product manager decided it was a good idea to add a website monitoring feature into document software.

cmhamill5• 13 years ago

Yes, this is probably the real issue.

packetslave• 13 years ago

You do realize that this is not a feature of Docs and no "product manager" had anything to do with it, right? Somebody wrote an app script that uses the URLFetchApp.fetch function.

By the way, Microsoft Office has, at various times, contained a flight simulator, a pinball game, and a first-person shooter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_eggs_in_Microsoft_produc...

Afforess• 13 years ago

This is awesome, in the sense that I am in awe that google lets you do this. Could you create a shareable doc to create a google powered DDOS of a site? Hypothetically, of course.

cfontes• 13 years ago

someone already did it, and to himself :D

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-...

mVChr• 13 years ago

Interesting read. Also, good on Amazon for the P.S at the end: "Amazon was nice enough to refund the bandwidth charges [...] as they considered this activity accidental and not intentional."

umami• 13 years ago

In my experience all HTTP requests made from Google Docs functions and scripts are cached for at least a few minutes. There are workarounds to that but I would guess they do throttling at an IP and domain level as well (being that they know a thing or two about crawling the web).

dingaling• 13 years ago

The script

http://ctrlq.org/code/19319-website-monitor-script

iterates through the URLs in the spreadsheet and for each invokes

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/url-fetc...

which can accept parameters for a URL.

If those GET requests initiate intensive processes, then there could be a problem.

tlongren2• 13 years ago

I really like this solution. Makes monitoring a BUNCH of sites really, really easy.

shoobie• 13 years ago

Love it - there is something very nice about having to setup a site monitor in a minute..

aroch2• 13 years ago

You're checking for a status 200, but what about sites that use 301 redirects or proxies?

oneeyedpigeon• 13 years ago

If you're using it to check your own site, presumably you know what the target of any 301 is beforehand, and can aim at that URL in the first place. Even if you're using a proper monitoring system, why force your server to handle twice the number of requests than it needs to?

erichurkman• 13 years ago

It still blows me away when I go to a root domain and get redirected to example.com/home or something similar. Or sites that append slashes to all URLs, but the content links to the slash-less copy, forcing every click to hit the server twice. Gah!

nkoren• 13 years ago

A cautionary tale: I was using this script for a while. Then Google Docs had some sort of freakout, and began sending me hundreds of "your site is down" emails, even after I tried to terminate the script and even deleted the document from my Google Drive. A few days later, the script finally terminated and the messages stopped.

flanbiscuit• 13 years ago

figured something like this would happen. Docs is not meant for this purpose. It's a cool hack and all but I'd expect issues at some point

eitally2• 13 years ago

AppsScript in general should not be used for production purposes, or anything that depends on timely and consistently responses. Even Google will tell you this (and they provide no SLA on AppsScript for enterprise customers, either). That said, it's still a lot of fun to play with, and there are all sorts of useful things you can do with scripts anyway.

vidyesh2• 13 years ago

It still annoys me, so I created a filter and it fills up that label now. No more inbox annoyance atleast.

JacobJans• 13 years ago

I would love to use this, but the app wants access to all of my spreadsheets at any time. It looks like I'll need to set up a dummy Google account first.

It looks really cool.

ljd• 13 years ago

I've used it and it is pretty mediocre or at times just inaccurate. I get so many false alerts from Google about the site being down that I've turned it off.

As another comment puts it, it's just the wrong tool for the job.

yaph• 13 years ago

I've used a modified version of the script for over a year now and was able to determine unreliable sites with it. Of course there can be temporary server issues and when you try to access the site it works again.

The script I wrote checks multiple sites in one go and sends one mail per script execution, if there are errors. I found that more manageable, the code for it is on GitHub https://github.com/yaph/sitemonitor

Imagenuity• 13 years ago

I just set this up. Works great! I recommend you run it once from the Run menu to make sure you entered a domain name correctly. You can comment out this line to get an email every time it runs (good for testing):

    // if (status !== 200)

petenixey• 13 years ago

I'm pleased to see people showing off what you can do with Google docs. I think most people (and even most developers) totally underestimate what's possible with Google Apps Script.

A great example of what is possible using Spreadsheets to do live dashboards and analysis of site data. If you use Heroku you can pump data directly from Heroku Dataclips into a Google spreadsheet using a live CSV URL and then analyse, munge and display it however you like.

Apps Script can both consume send data to other web services so coupled with Heroku Dataclips or Chartio.com it's super powerful. It's a great way to skip a lot of UI work or even for someone with business savvy but no official programming skill to get directly into their database and spelunk around.

uladzislau• 13 years ago

I highly recommend http://www.uptimerobot.com which is a free tool. You can monitor up to 50 sites with 5 min intervals. Very useful email notifications specifying how much time your site was unavailable.

nacs• 13 years ago

+1 for Uptimerobot. I've used it for 2 years or so now and it works great.

HugoDias• 13 years ago

You're asking for a lot of permissions, huh? ... Why you need to Manage my calendar ?

aroch2• 13 years ago

I assume because, AFAIK, SMS notifications are handled by Google Calendar. So to give you the warning it makes an event with an SMS reminder that contains the warning as its topic

zschoche• 13 years ago

Why exactly does need this app access to all my data at google?

Scary

toddmorey• 13 years ago

Interesting spreadsheet hack, but it's just looking for a 200 response. I use Pingdom, which allows you to look for specific content in the response, even on the free plan. It's a better guarantee that the page rendered successfully end-to-end.

genericacct• 13 years ago

I've hacked something similar with ethercalc (npm install ethercalc) and you should too because you never know when google will sunset your favorite feature..

(RIP reader)

jsloat• 13 years ago

Noon question: couldn't you just write a simple script to do the same thing and set up a cron job on a free hosting service like GApps instead?

geerlingguy• 13 years ago

I have tested this in the past, and a few clients on the service I launched last year (https://servercheck.in/) have also reported the same: Google Docs is unreliable at best. Besides false positives, there were at least two or three outages (sometimes for an hour or more) unreported.

Google Docs is not meant to be a status monitoring tool. Use the right tool for the job; there are plenty of free and cheap alternatives that do things much better, are more reliable, and save you setup and maintenance time.

mc• 13 years ago

I wrote something like this a few months ago.

Depending on Google Spreadsheet for uptime monitoring is nothing more than just a fun hack. I'm surprised that some people here are taking it so seriously. If you're using a script like this, then I hope it's just to keep those single dynos from falling asleep :)

It's also subject to Google Docs availability, my script sometimes fails to run with only a "We're sorry, a server error occurred. Please wait a bit and try again." email notification.

icoder• 13 years ago

I was held back by the amount of permissions it requires

lazylizard• 13 years ago

um. i'm curious why using this results in a high false positive rate. google docs has dodgy connectivity??? would checking if yahoo.com is up first, before checking each url, reduce the false positives?

Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs

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