
Show HN: Simple monitoring service - vruiz
https://ping.gg
======
encoderer
Congrats on shipping. I run a very different kind of monitoring service
(alerts when your cron jobs and other scheduled tasks don't run or take too
long, see my profile for details). I'm wondering why you don't offer paid
plans. In addition to reward for your work, business users really would rather
rely on a business and not a hobby. Maybe your target market is hobbyists but
you should certainly consider a paid plan early on. Our subscribers are an
important voice in our product decisions and doubly so early on.

~~~
vruiz
Thanks. This project for me is just a proof of concept. Having paid customers
would require dedicating massively more time to initial development and
maintenance, which simply I'm not ready to do until the idea is somewhat
validated. Best of luck with your venture!

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vruiz
btw, the ping engine is a Go app that pings each hosts in a separate
goroutine. I might open source it in the future once the code has more tests
and less shame.

~~~
joepie91_
There is no minimum quality requirement for an open-source release :)

~~~
vruiz
haha, there is if I ever want to get another programming job! It's bad, trust
me. The ping function is just a retouched version of Go's icmp test:
[https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/ipraw_test....](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/ipraw_test.go#L95)

and that's the _good_ part.

~~~
joepie91_
I wouldn't worry too much about it. Everybody writes horrible duct-tape code
at some point, and showing how you improved/refactored the code is a much
nicer thing than showing how you supposedly magically got it right the first
time :)

~~~
mdewinter
I would also like to see it open. I'd love to host something like this for my
own networks which are not internet reachable.

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deathhand
This is awesome but what is the motivation behind this? Why do you care to set
up a server and pay for the (minimal) bandwidth that is needed for this
service? Is this purely an act of goodwill? Do you hope that this will gain
traction so that you can start charging for the service? Are you secretly
harvesting clusters of IP addresses of HN readers?

~~~
vruiz
Good question! I think most of us with pet projects do it either to learn
something or with the hopes of gaining a lot of traction and one day implement
some paid feature. For me it was both.

Maybe one day if there are a lot of users I'll implement paid accounts with
more than 10 alerts and history dashboard. But most likely it will never gain
enough traction for that, in which case it's no problem, since I have 6 tiny
servers for different activities and this only uses 2 of the with minimal
resources (it's just ping). It will just sit there alerting me and some others
when something goes down.

~~~
geerlingguy
+1 to this. I've set up a few services of a similar nature, and a couple were
worth enough _to me_ to go to a further length and monetize, but only insofar
as it paid my server bills and added a little on top for taxes and such.

It feels great to hack on something like this, and not worry about billing
integration and supporting paid customers at first.

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ivanhoe
Maybe you should slow down the ping interval a bit, because there is no
authentication and someone might run it on a big number of IPs of the same
network class, and that will quickly get your IP banned on routers. No one
really needs to check the server every 5 seconds (not on free service at
least). Perhaps you can make a burst of 4-5 pings every minute or 5 minutes,
that would be quite sufficient IMHO, and would significantly reduce your
traffic and expenses.

~~~
vruiz
I gave the interval some thought, and while I might have to increase it in the
future, I think 5 seconds is a good place to start. This is just a single
innocuous ICMP echo packet, not port scanning. And a single user can only set
up 10 pings, so it will require quite some manual effort to generate some
noticeable traffic.

When I implement HTTP checks however, yes, the interval will have to be in the
minutes.

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techaddict009
Any plans to implement feature like complete server monitoring? Like Google
analytic's for Server monitoring?

This is simple yet helpful tool. Those who wish to stay away from nitty gritty
of configuring complex apps to monitor their server this can be helpful.

~~~
vruiz
Indeed there are plans in my head. But that could only happen if I manage to
get a big user base while at the same time I find a way to fight abuse without
compromising simplicity.

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rafaqueque
Congrats on shipping!

I wrote a software like this, tried to ship it but I failed. Now it's open-
source for everyone.

If you're interested, grab it.

[https://github.com/rafaqueque/responsly](https://github.com/rafaqueque/responsly)

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fuzzfree
Checking every 5 seconds...! You will probably get blocked by a firewall....

Every 5 minutes is more than fine for a free service (and do future upgrades
for every 1 min or constant monitoring).

In any case let the user select their interval.

Nice work btw!

~~~
vruiz
I've never been block by just pinging anything, but if that happens for
someone, well... it'll simply won't work for that user. No big deal, that's
the upside of being a free no-SLA service :)

As for my own side of the net, I asked someone at DO and I was told that it
should not be a problem.

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nodesocket
Nice job for releasing this. However, seems hard to compete with pingdom, who
have exponentially more features and integrations and are relatively
inexpensive. Kuddos on shipping!

~~~
toomuchtodo
> seems hard to compete with pingdom

As a DevOps, I'd like to disagree with this. Pingdom previously was a joy to
work with. Now that they're attempting to bring in PagerDuty-esq features
(escalation policies instead of simple alerting), their UX leaves a bit to be
desired. Also, I don't have high hopes after the Solarwinds acquisition.

~~~
halayli
I created [https://webmon.com](https://webmon.com) . I'd love to hear your
feedback on it since you were a Pingdom customer.

~~~
ddon
Too expensive... Why all monitor services charge so much for so simple
service?

~~~
halayli
It's not as simple as you'd think. Monitoring 1 website is easy, monitoring 1M
websites and gathering results in realtime from stations around the globe to
make a proper decision is a different thing. Significant bandwidth, and CPU
are needed to achieve this, not to mention relying on third party services
like twilio and sendgrid to notify customers and that cost money too.

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mdewinter
This is fun:

$ curl ping.gg/monitoring@me.com/127.0.0.1 [ ok ] Ping alert created for host
'127.0.0.1' and email 'monitoring@me.com'. Check your email to activate it.

~~~
vruiz
Haha, I actually thought about replying a "you are an smartass" error when
someone subscribes to to 127.. or ping.gg itself :)

There is an alert limit per host, so not everyone will be able to do the same.
Congrats!

~~~
nacs
Why not just blacklist local-only IP ranges?

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tux
Very nice. I wish more services would be as simple as thigs ^_^

~~~
vruiz
thanks. Indeed the service totally lacks features and maybe reliability, but
my whole intention was to find the lowest possible barrier of entry, which I
too find very high in most online tools.

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Kliment
Does this mean if I set up an alert for a server anyone can then add me to any
number of alerts without further confirmation?

~~~
vruiz
if someone knowns your email address and that you've confirmed it, then yes,
that someone could set up more, but the limit is 10.

If that ever happens to you, you could: 1) pause the unwanted alerts, and
remove some only when you need new ones. 2) if you panic, use the
"unsubscribe" button that will block any future emails to your address.

Having such a low barrier of entry does not come without tradeoffs.

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Injunire
The links in your sent emails appear to be broken. All URL's to deactivate and
pause alerts are pointing to localhost.

~~~
vruiz
When did you receive that email? is it new? that bug should have been fixed.

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hcarvalhoalves
I like the fact your signup boils down to one HTTP GET and a verification
email. That's some revolutionary stuff.

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tobobo
I love the interface! However, I'm getting "looks down from here" alerts for
every URL. oops!

~~~
vruiz
some bored guy is attacking it right now, try again a bit later. also, which
host did you try?

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Procrastes
I love this kind of tool, simple and useful. Extra points for leading with a
commandline example.

~~~
vruiz
I was particularly proud for thinking of colouring the reply for curl, I had
to show it off :)

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mashlol
This is very useful, thanks for hosting it. Awesome website too, and super
easy to set up.

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detaro
Does it monitor itself? If yes, what is it showing right now? (Site is down
for me)

~~~
vruiz
actually, I just realized someone is trying to DOS the site creating massive
random accounts. Please unknown hacker, don't be a dick, this is just a pet
project.

~~~
detaro
Boo to that. I hope they stop/you manage to block them!

~~~
vruiz
Boo indeed! Seems like he/them got tired of it for now.

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mdewinter
Very simple and very nice, how cool! Good job.

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motyar
How to stop?

~~~
walrus
There's a 'remove alert' link in the activation email.

