Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your websites?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915595

by techiferous • 17 years ago

40 71 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm looking for a simple service that sends me an email or text message if a website goes down. Any suggestions?

jacquesm• 17 years ago

Nagios and Monit

Monit after a tip here, great little program.

warp• 17 years ago

Did you see 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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

Pingdom - 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• 17 years ago

pingdom too. Mostly for response times, thaat's much more interesting to me than uptime.

spencerfry• 17 years ago

We use Pingdom also.

alecco4• 17 years ago

Priced at 2x-4x of a web hosting plan? No alternate DNS management? Crazy.

bentlegen• 17 years 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.

rajuvegesna• 17 years ago

http://site24x7.com

johng• 17 years ago

Pingdom here as well. I think it could stand to be quite a bit cheaper but it works well.

dlsspy• 17 years ago

I wrote this thing for myself: http://dustin.github.com/whatsup/

carl_• 17 years ago

Pingdom with email2sms gateway for external/global checks and zabbix for internal checks

aneesh• 17 years ago

http://mon.itor.us/

It sends you an email when a site goes down. The free version pings every 20 minutes or so.

mcav• 17 years ago

I'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.

DenisM3• 17 years ago

Does 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• 17 years ago

Hmm. 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.

DenisM3• 17 years ago

The 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• 17 years ago

http://wasitup.com

eworoshow• 17 years ago

Worked well for me recently when Linode crashed and burned, it let me know almost right away.

uggedal• 17 years ago

Which is kind of strange as the service is running on Linode itself. I'm currently working on redundancy across data centers/providers.

crxnamja• 17 years ago

pingdom.com

techiferous6• 17 years ago

Has anybody used http://www.howsthe.com or http://www.aremysitesup.com ?

colinplamondon• 17 years ago

Pingdom, 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• 17 years ago

cloudkick for my slicehost and ec2 instances.

cmelbye• 17 years ago

CloudKick also, very nice for some general, free monitors with email notifications.

spudlyo• 17 years ago

check_http, one of the stock plugins for nagios.

moomerman5• 17 years ago

I'm working on 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.

techiferous6• 17 years ago

I'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/ 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?

moomerman5• 17 years ago

Yeah, 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.

andrewtj3• 17 years ago

I just signed up for your service. The interface is quick, clean and intuitive - frankly, it's a relief to use it. I also have to give you props for having an SMS setup that works internationally. A handy addition for me would be DNS monitoring.

moomerman5• 17 years ago

Thanks for the great feedback, it's always good to hear! I'll add DNS monitoring to the list.

chadr• 17 years ago

Pingdom for site uptime & paging, munin for capacity planning and performance monitoring, and monit for process monitoring.

daleharvey• 17 years ago

I have been meaning to try out http://boxedice.com

jzting• 17 years ago

http://www.montastic.com

brixon• 17 years ago

We use what used to be called IPCheck. http://www.paessler.com/prtg You can run this with 10 sensors for free.

stuntgoat• 17 years ago

Why 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 )

techiferous6• 17 years ago

The thought crossed my mind when I saw pingdom's prices.

joevandyk2• 17 years ago

pingdom 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• 17 years ago

I use http://aremysitesup.com/. I think I may have even heard about it on HN when they launched.

barmstrong• 17 years ago

I 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.

andrewtj3• 17 years ago

Don'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.

moe3• 17 years ago

Actually 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...

truebosko2• 17 years ago

I use 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 :)

techiferous6• 17 years ago

Wow, 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?

truebosko2• 17 years ago

I'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• 17 years ago

http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/

dugmartin• 17 years ago

wormly.com

rsanders• 17 years ago

Wormly 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• 17 years ago

http://chartbeat.com/ I can't describe in words how awesome this service is for just $10/month.

kvs• 17 years ago

Same here. Good one to monitor user interaction and flow in real-time. I also like the replay.

joevandyk2• 17 years ago

i use nagios to monitor a lot of sites. there's also montastic.

latortuga• 17 years ago

We 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• 17 years ago

I 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/)

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• 17 years ago

I use the Website Hack detector 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• 17 years ago

www.watchmouse.com

sucuri22• 17 years ago

I will recommend http://sucuri.net

Not only it monitors if your site is down, but also if it has been blacklisted, defaced, etc.

sucuri22• 17 years ago

and it is free... :) forgot to add that.

DenisM3• 17 years ago

I 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.

Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your websites?

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