[VoiceOps] Recommended Website/IP monitoring tool

[Pete Mundy]

This is all sounding _very_ familiar! We do quite similar things using RPis here too, right down to the reverse SSH tunnels. Incredibly useful for remote diagnosis, visibility and proactive response. Our sample size isn't huge, only just over 3X what you've mentioned, but thus-far we've had zero hardware fails and some of them have been deployed and active for over 3 years.

We also designed and 3D-print our own rack-mount (or wall-mount) cases which expose only the ethernet and power ports, with the power port right there at the front of the rack so they customer can easily pull it out and plug it back in again if needed.

Pete
	

> On 12/02/2016, at 1:38 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.  :)
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