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What do you want in a website/server monitoring service?
Hi,
I am building an uptime monitoring service for the low end segment.
It's being done by improving on the (self written)site monitoring scripts I have been using for my sites(about 150 including clients) for about 3 years now.
What it does right now is very basic (that was all I needed!). It
1. Tries to fetch the test page/home page of the site at specified intervals.
2. Verifies page integrity by keyword matching.
3. Alerts me by email if either of the above tests fail. There is some extra logic built in for deciding the severity of the failure and raising an alarm.(3rd party sms alert is also there and I don't get false/useless alarms often).
4. Alerts again when an offline site goes online.
5. Logs errors(with details) and site load times to database on every test for future analysis.
6. Checks sites from 3 different geographic locations.
7. Provides a front end showing error events in a tabular format and load times on a line graph for each of the monitoring locations.
I just wanted to know:
-if the above be of any use to website/vps/server owners
-whats the desired monitor interval
-if there is anything serious missing
-if there is anything unnecessary
-if there is a feature desirable but not critical
-how much would anyone be willing to pay per site(if at all)
-how many sites ideal for the free accounts
etc etc
Actually looking for some brainstorming and debate on this before I close the feature list. And, I'll pay back the community with at least some free premium accounts!
(convince me, this is a bad plan, and the above package will be freely downloadable for use on your servers)
Hope I am not violating any forum rules as I am new here!
-G V Rao
Comments
maybe an auto script that picks up on new vps's created on a node and adds them to the status list. so customer orders vps. auto setup, auto added to list to monitor.
if there is already something like this let me know
For website owners yes, for vps/server owners not necessary. What I find as big disadvantage of such uptime monitoring services is that they require vps with webserver/site hosting. It's not like all vps owners would host sites on their vpses.
Most of us use something like free pingdom website monitoring to monitor our sites uptime however it would be nice to have some service which would monitor server (IP?) uptime without webserver requirement.
Agree with this. The ability to measure uptime by IP. I use Pingdom also and tagBeep ping check but recently tagBeep keeps giving me false downtime readings and sending a lot of email for my BuyVM vps. I know that vps has uptime of 22+ days right now.
@rkrazy the vps may be up but the network may be unreachable.
@Spirit I always hated using just ping for monitoring as it's just a response. It's not really showing that the server can deal with a request. Maybe try to access ssh and see what the monitoring service gets back? Or even sftp?
drmike, yes of course. This what I suggested was just example (as you said there could be better solutions to reach this) as alternative to all those website uptime monitoring services. Primary I would suggest vps/server uptime monitoring service instead standard website uptime monitoring service.
@Spirit I agree that webserver requirement is a disadvantage.
@drmike I confirm that ping is not the way to monitor a server status accurately
- vps/server status monitoring(based on IP) without use of webserver added to feature list. will see how to implement it in a better way.
- Along with it comes the facility to check mailservers, nameservers and ftp servers(list expandable)
@rkrazy There is other side of the coin, i.e you get no report of site being down but visitors are not able to get the service. ping ok but httpd or mysql down etc
Now, this service monitors every aspect of a website and it will let you know what exactly went wrong and when it says it's online, it's in fact accessible to visitors. (reports dns problem, network problem, httpd problem, site being disfigured/hacked etc)
@daimonb automatic vps additions and the stuff would require scripts running on the client node with some privileges. Will get into that once the main service is running.
I always knew there are lot of other services for monitoring. But found it easier to write those scripts myself to get exactly what I wanted.
I am here to know what others wanted and to understand the practical issues.
Btw,
Where will you host your service?
I hope it is not on the will-be-on-dead-pool LEB
This would be great and I believe useful also for many others as even some most popular uptime monitoring services don't include this option. Thank you.
Ping monitoring and service monitoring are different things. Ping is a network test. It's a great tool for monitoring network status. It isn't intended to show whether or not your webserver daemon has crashed. No reason to hate it for that
Agreed but the thread is titled server monitoring.
Well to be nitpicky, server monitoring doesn't necessarily mean service monitoring... I'll stop now