Announcing remote service monitoring
As of today, we’re pleased to announce remote response time and up/down status monitoring of external URLs in addition to the existing monitoring of internal server metrics via our agent. The new Server Density service monitoring allows you to define a URL that will be checked at configurable intervals to ensure it is responding from multiple locations around the world.
Features
- Monitor any HTTP or HTTPS URL at any interval from every 30 seconds upwards with unlimited alerts per service.
- Get alerts when your service stops responding or when response time is greater than any configurable threshold.
- Monitor your service from a specific location or round robin across all worldwide monitoring locations with alerting when the service appears down from one or more locations.
- Check the response for the presence or absence of a specific string.
- Alerting when the full response MD5 checksum does not match what is expected.
- Alerting on specific HTTP status codes.
- Historical graphs for HTTP status codes and response times.
- Full support for HTTP auth, custom POST fields and custom headers.
- Snapshots to show the full response and content every 5 minutes and when alerts are triggered.
- Combined dashboard for servers and services, including in full screen mode.
- All the same options you already have for alerting – e-mail, SMS, iPhone, Android, groups, multiple users, delays and “fixed” notifications.
Pricing
This is available for free for all accounts until 1st September when we will start charging £1 GBP (~$1.65 USD) per service per month, exc VAT for EU customers. It will be combined with your normal bill so your first invoice for services will be on 1st October.
Services will use the same billing structure as servers – based on the highest waterlevel number of services in a given calendar month. E.g. add 3 services in September then remove 1, you’ll be billed for 3 in September and 2 in October.
If you don’t want to be billed for testing the service this month then be sure to remove your services before 00:00:00 1st September 2011 UTC.
Monitoring locations
We’re launching with 5 monitoring locations in the US, Ireland, Singapore and Japan from the Amazon Web Services data centres. We’ll be quickly adding new locations over the next few weeks so let us know if there’s anywhere in particular you want us to monitor from.
Mobile and API
A new API with methods for getting service monitoring data is completed but we’re just finishing off the documentation, so watch out for an announcement on this blog in the next week or so.
You can already receive push notifications for service alerts via our mobile apps but we’re nearing completion on a revamp of both our iPhone and Android apps which will include service monitoring, so watch out for another announcement on this blog in the coming weeks.
Specific technical details
We’ve written up some documentation around specific functionality like service states, round robin locations and response string MD5 matching.
Enjoy this post? You may also like Growing an ops team from 1 founder