

Ask YC: What tools do you use for notifications of server/site uptime? - shafqat

Wondering what the best tools for notifications are. Specifically, something to monitor the server and the site to make sure its up. What do people use? Is it best to use a built-in notification tool on the server for the site uptime monitoring?
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ephextom
We use a monitoring service called Wormly... <http://www.wormly.com/>

It's run by a friend of ours who used to work at Sitepoint and was frustrated
by the limited options for good, affordable, distributed monitoring. He's been
running it for over 2 years and is growing fast.

It's a great service and recommended as a YC-style startup worth supporting.

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danielha
We use Pingdom (<http://pingdom.com>)

Simple but it works.

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goodkarma
I use two different scripts:

1\. dwatch [http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/29/surviving-
rails-1...](http://nubyonrails.com/articles/2006/03/29/surviving-
rails-1-1-with-server-monitoring)

2\. a PHP script that accesses a URL on the other server; if the server does
not respond as expected, it sends me a SMS and emails the server admin

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rrival
To monitor more than uptime and service availability, the high end of this is
automated performance measurement analysis by Keynote Systems (keynote.com).
They have a lower end product called <http://redalert.com/> (formerly its own
service) which is comparable to pingdom.

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chrisbolt
Cacti and Pingdom (www.pingdom.com) for external monitoring.

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goofygrin
I use Monit on my server to make sure my services are running. It also
restarts them if they fail.

I use a free uptime service to make sure that my servers are reachable:
<http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/>

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jjguy
Python script + e-mail to your cell phone number.

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lvecsey
I've used nagios and before that, ganglia for some monitoring. I've been
looking into cacti lately for monitoring qmail message status and an asterisk
installation for the number of active channels.

Many of these systems use rrdtool and even though I've used that tool directly
before, with Cacti at least its a bit tricky to get familiar with the way the
gui and the different templates are interconnected. The look and feel sure
does seem polished though.

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shafqat
Wow, thanks for all the great feedback. We're going to try Pingdom first. I
also liked nagios for its ability to restart services automatically - very
cool.

If anyone wants an invite to NewsCred, shoot me a mail: shafqat at
newscred.com. Its not much, but thought I should say thanks!

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M-MZ
Monit! Highly recommended. You can easily set it up to monitor local daemons,
watch disk space, memory, external systems and more. Monit can also restart
failing daemons.

<http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/>

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natch
GroundWork (<http://www.groundworkopensource.com/>). It uses Nagios under the
hood, but I wouldn't want to set up Nagios by hand (without the GroundWork
config tools) at a largish site like ours.

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jbyers
Pingdom and Alertra. Alertra has had a perfect record for us for three years,
meaning no false reports over that time (as far as we can tell). A bit more
expensive, we use a single Alertra alert and multiple Pingdom alerts.

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thorax
I've been using hosttracker.com for years because they have a 2-site free
service.

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xenoterracide
nagios

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simianstyle
Is there a way to configure Nagios to send MSM text alerts when your site is
down? I haven't fully dove into the documentation yet.

~~~
hendra
u mean SMS text (not sure what's MSM as you put it). If SMS, yup, we're doing
it with Nagios.

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mkull
rackspace provides support for verifying our sites are operating properly.

in addition we use monit and then finally we use wormly as a catchall

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gustaf
Nagios and Pingdom

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nostrademons
Monit.

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nreece
Hyperspin

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ortelius
munin and nagios

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blader
pingdom

