Show HN: Simple monitoring service

[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!

[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 :)

[kbar13]

Who cares just open source it. People who are interested might even send you some pull requests

[mcklaw]

How to remove alerts?

BTW, +1 to HTTP support, a must-have.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[vruiz]

Thanks! No intention to compete, as it says on the page it's not meant for professional purposes (of course, success might change that). It's mostly a pet project to monitor pet projects.

[tux]

Some one still uses pingdom ? LOL I find this "ping.gg" much more useful for me.

[mdewinter]

This is fun:

$ curl ping.gg/[email protected]/127.0.0.1 [ ok ] Ping alert created for host '127.0.0.1' and email '[email protected]'. 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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[hcarvalhoalves]

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

[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?

[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 :)

[mashlol]

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

[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.

[vruiz]

hahaha, how ironic. No, there is no meta monitoring. The site it's actually up, just really slow ATM, but I'm logged it and everything look fine and access logs as fluent. I think it might be some connectivity issues with digital ocean.

[mdewinter]

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

[motyar]

How to stop?

[walrus]

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