

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

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

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

~~~
bentlegen
$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.

~~~
alecco
If you pre-pay 3 months or a year a good web hosting costs $4.5-7/month, with
cronjobs, and plenty of space where you can store regular offsite backups.

An almost trivial one-liner with curl can do this kind of service.

~~~
moe
If your site is small enough to run on a $7 webhosting plan then you probably
don't need monitoring.

~~~
alecco
No, I don't mean to run your site on a web hosting. The thread topic was a
monitoring service that pings a website and alerts you charging a ridiculous
amount, in my opinion, for an extremely simple service to deploy SEPARATELY on
a web hosting plan.

~~~
moe
Well, if that amount seems ridiculous to you then you're looking at the wrong
figure. Have you considered what it costs to have an engineer sit down and
write a proper monitoring and alerting system? Even a small one, i.e. the
proverbial curl-loop?

 _That_ is the figure you should be looking at because even if you assume only
a single day of work you can already buy many months of pingdom service for
the same money.

Moreover even the smallest monitoring utility takes quite a bit more effort
than a single day once you take SMS alerts with backoff (you don't want to
spam, right?), scheduled downtimes and overall babysitting into account. Been
there, done that.

So, look at the big picture and those $10 bucks suddenly become a no-brainer.

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thesethings
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.)

------
moomerman
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.

~~~
andrewtj
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.

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

------
aneesh
<http://mon.itor.us/>

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

------
jacquesm
Nagios and Monit

Monit after a tip here, great little program.

------
dlsspy
I wrote this thing for myself: <http://dustin.github.com/whatsup/>

------
stuntgoat
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 )

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

~~~
joevandyk
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.

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DenisM
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
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.

~~~
DenisM
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.

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

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

------
niels
<http://wasitup.com>

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

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

------
warp
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
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 ;)

------
truebosko
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 :)

~~~
techiferous
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?

~~~
truebosko
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.

------
rajuvegesna
<http://site24x7.com>

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barmstrong
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.

~~~
andrewtj
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.

~~~
moe
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...

~~~
andrewtj
You're ascribing a social phenomena to a technical implementation.

------
wowfactor
I use the Website Hack detector [http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-
detect-if-your-web...](http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-detect-if-
your-webserver-is-hacked-and-get-alerted/) with another program called site
up. It is easy & quick to setup.

------
daleharvey
I have been meaning to try out <http://boxedice.com>

------
dylanz
<http://www.dotcom-monitor.com/>

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

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

------
jzting
<http://www.montastic.com>

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

------
sucuri2
I will recommend <http://sucuri.net>

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

~~~
sucuri2
and it is free... :) forgot to add that.

~~~
DenisM
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.

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

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

------
colinplamondon
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.

------
mcav
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.

------
latortuga
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.

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

------
stanleydrew
cloudkick for my slicehost and ec2 instances.

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

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spudlyo
check_http, one of the stock plugins for nagios.

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

------
dugmartin
wormly.com

~~~
rsanders
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.

------
dedalus
www.watchmouse.com

------
crxnamja
pingdom.com

