[VoiceOps] Recommended Website/IP monitoring tool

[Rob Dawson]

I love the idea of a roll your own probe/remote access/monitoring tools like this. I started playing with a similar idea a few years back using a Soekris. The great thing about Soekris as a platform was the fact that it had multiple interfaces. I setup two interfaces as a bridge and could insert it inline to gather traffic stats, pcaps, etc., without having to worry about setting up a span port and while still having a dedicated interface for the host.

Most of our customers were connected to us via MPLS so I had setup a script to e-mail the host IP at startup time, but I like the idea of the reverse SSH connection.

Of course, the great thing about Pi is that the cost is like 10% of the Soekris which makes it easy to justify.

Rob

From: VoiceOps [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Graham Freeman
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 7:38 PM
To: Chris Aloi
Cc: <voiceops at voiceops.org>
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Recommended Website/IP monitoring tool

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<tel:+1-510-898-6772>
graham at nerdventures.com<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<tel:%2B1-510-898-6772>
graham at nerdventures.com<mailto: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<mailto: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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