[OPINION] Server Monitoring.

Com3x

Hi LET Members,

It's my first post on this board so it will also be a kind of introduction too ! I was a reader before and I now want to be more "active" on the community. I, of course (lol), have some LEB (some not so low end too) and two dedicated servers. I actually monitor most of them with UptimeRobot and MonitorUS for the "hobby's" ones. But for the "prodution's" ones what would you advise ? I have some internal monitors but I really really prefer cloud based service because :

• They can test your server from basically everywhere in the world
• They have multiple access to the www, multiple ways of notification, etc.
• They have advanced features (not as advanced as Nagios for example but enough for me)
• And the main argument for me, most of time you don't need to monitor the monitor ! :-)

Thanks for your answers.

dhamaniasad

Monitis is pretty good, its quite costly though. NodePing is good as well.

matthewvz

I've been using StatusCake and pingdom, they are both nice.

mikeg

We use pingdom, works perfect for us.

badpatrick

Also a fan of Pingdom.

tuguhost

we use pingdom and happy with it

mikeg

Jack said: Pingdom sucks

why?

black

Custom bash script, uptimerobot to confirm

jar

@mikeg said:
why?

When it's good it's good, when it's bad it's really bad. There are some cases where it seems to get false reports quite often and while I personally can't explain it, it's really annoying to have it shoved in your face constantly as "proof" of downtime that didn't happen.

+1 for NodePing

mikeg

@jarland said:
+1 for NodePing

Fair enough. I haven't experienced this yet. Nodeping looks good though. I like the unlimited SMS and the price looks a lot better than Pingdom. Do they offer a public status page like Pingdom?

mikeg

@Jack said:
Yeah, like this http://status.securedragon.net/

Doesn't look as good as the Pingdom one, but I'll probably switch due to the pricing difference!

utama

I'm using New Relic to monitor my VPS.

typh0n

@utama said:
I'm using New Relic to monitor my VPS.

Looks interesting. Can you tell me how much memory it uses?

Droidzone

I never felt a need to rely on a third party service for monitoring. I run my own solution, Geekping on a couple of servers. I set cron for any frequency I require (1min by default), and configure email alerts in the software.

jar

@joelgm said:
I never felt a need to rely on a third party service for monitoring. I run my own solution, Geekping on a couple of servers. I set cron for any frequency I require (1min by default), and configure email alerts in the software.

Nice find, thanks for the share.

Droidzone

@jarland said:
Nice find, thanks for the share.

Find? I wrote it. :P

jar

@joelgm said:

Even better then, thanks for sharing. Definitely gonna give that thing a try.

AlexanderM

@Jack said:
Pingdom sucks, Nodeping is amazing, Statuscake only does 5 minute monitoring periods you can't have it checking every minute.

Status cake free is every 60 seconds

Awmusic12635

Using statuscake here

ghost

AD Time:
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/17958/2013-review-server-status-monitor-script-tool-from-let/p1

joelgm said: Find? I wrote it. :P

When the Geekping will release 1.0?

Droidzone

@ghost said:
When the Geekping will release 1.0?

When I consider it completely bug free, security audited, and contains most of the things I can imagine, and is idiot-proof..

Melon

I use Uptime Robot because it's free and StatusCake is too complicated for the absolute basic shit I need.

AnthonySmith

Pingdom, because it not only tells you something is down it also provides some information about why it reported the fact it was down.

Com3x

Wow ! Thank you all for your answers, I hope it helps others like it helps me now ! I personally think that Pingdom is good but not as good as others for the same price range. I think I'll try Nodeping too. @joelgm and @jarland, as i said before, I already have my own monitoring solution too but I think we sometimes have to rely on some third party services because :

• What would you do if your monitoring server goes down ?
• Who can say that your server is available in X or Y place in the world ?

Of course it always depends on your needs. And yeah, who said he was a warrior ? :-)

wlambrechts

I'm using monitive.com and have been very happy with it !

sleddog

Self-written and self-hosted script, running on two LEBs at different locations, cronned for every 5 minutes, staggered (so a check every 2-3 minutes). Email alerts. Works for me.

drserver

observium

tr1cky

Never had problems with pingdom and statuscake had a lot of problems and I still don't know if they're all fixed. My pingdom acc runs out in a month though, probably gonna settle for something else, they're too expensive.

Dylan

You left Pingdom, by far the biggest player in monitoring, out of the poll so I have no doubts most of those "something else" answers are from people who use them. It's too bad, would have been interesting to see the results with them in.

wojons

I wrote my own server monitoring application that i am turning into a Saas product that includes external monitoing server stats, and stack traces for php and python, ruby (considering)

utama

@typh0n said:
Looks interesting. Can you tell me how much memory it uses?

Under 10MB.