[VoiceOps] Recommended Website/IP monitoring tool

[Christopher Aloi]

You could do some interesting things with the PI's GPIO ports too... flash
a LED to locate it in a rack, triggering a relay to reset a cable modem,
log environmental data etc..

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 7:38 PM Graham Freeman <graham at nerdventures.com>
wrote:

> 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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