[VoiceOps] Recommended Website/IP monitoring tool

[Graham Freeman]

Yep, with my managed network customers. I have a small number of customers,
each of which is meaningfully profitable, so a $100/year deployment of a Pi
with a fancier USB wifi interface is well worth it.  I set up reverse SSH
sessions (originating from the Pi) to distinct per-customer bastion hosts
on my management networks, so that the customer's firewall and/or
dynamic-IP issues are non-issues.   I use Chef, git, and some shell scripts
for config management.

I've had 1 Pi fail out of 20.  So, reliable enough, though of course not a
huge sample size.

It's great to be able to say "Hey, customer, I noticed a routing issue
impacting your web-based accounting software on your ISP A, so I
automatically promoted ISP B to primary for that route.  Monitoring (graph
screenshot attached) indicates that this was an effective workaround.  I'll
restore normal routing or promote ISP B to primary off-hours tonight,
depending on the outcome of the trouble ticket I've already opened about
the issue." before the first tech support call comes in.  Similar customer
success story when I call them immediately after getting an alert from the
Pi-connected UPS informing me of a power outage.  This kind of thing makes
the next 2-year renewal negotiation an easy one.  :)



Graham Freeman, Principal Nerd
NerdVentures.com <https://nerdventures.com/>
+1-510-898-6772
graham at nerdventures.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamfreeman
Twitter: @get_nerdy <https://twitter.com/get_nerdy>

On 11 February 2016 at 16:26, Chris Aloi <ctaloi at gmail.com> wrote:

> You have pi's deployed on the customer premise running smoke ping ?
> Great idea, have they been reliable ? I've only played with them - never
> production.  How do you handle managing a pi fleet ?
>
> ---
> Christopher Aloi
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Feb 11, 2016, at 3:36 PM, Graham Freeman <graham at nerdventures.com>
> wrote:
>
> I use and like StatusCake.com <http://statuscake.com> as a hosted
> monitoring provider, and SmokePing as an internally-managed monitoring tool.
>
> StatusCake has been reliable, and offers nice features such as worldwide
> monitoring endpoints, outage confirmation, configurable paging methods and
> thresholds, etc.  They also support different types of monitoring, ranging
> from a simple ICMP ping to a more complex mix of HTTP(S), keyword
> monitoring, blocklist monitoring, etc.   The pricing is good enough that
> I've forgotten how much it costs.
>
> SmokePing's advantages include (1) it's open source, (2) it's relatively
> easy to install and configure, (3) it's lightweight enough to run on
> customer-side Raspberry Pis, (4) it supports extremely fine-grained
> monitoring (e.g. my endpoints will detect and optionally alert on outages
> of <5 seconds), and so on.  The software is free, as it's open-source, and
> it could be implemented on a $5/mo VPS at somewhere like DigitalOcean.
>
> good luck,
>
> Graham Freeman, Principal Nerd
> NerdVentures.com <http://nerdventures.com>
> +1-510-898-6772
> graham at nerdventures.com
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamfreeman
> Twitter: @get_nerdy
>
> On 11 Feb 02016, at 12:28, Li Tiatia <tiatia at tcnp3.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
> Anyone have any suggestions on recommended website/IP monitoring tools?
> There are so many out there and just need help to narrow the list down
> based on what you're using or have good experience with.
>
> Thank you.
> *_________________________________*
>
> *Li Tiatia*
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