Statping for website monitoring
25 Sep 2019When you run a sh*tload of web sites and APIs, you need to check continuously whether they are still running or not. For public websites you can find quite a lot of freemium or paid SaaS services but, like me, you might need something that also works on your local network (LAN). For that, you need a self-hosted open-source software, that you can run on an internal server or Docker container. So I started looking around for a self-hosted solution.
First off, this is what I had in mind: I wanted a worthy local alternative for Freshping. We use it for monitoring of public websites, it comes with 50 URL checks for free, with status pages and alerting, it’s great. But an external SaaS cannot monitor your internal (LAN) services.
So this means concretely:
- just monitor URLs, not machine stats like disk space, CPU%, and also no local agents required
- definition of “down” can be customized: no response, wrong status code (e.g. error 500) or also “does not contain string XYZ”
- grouping URLs in collections (e.g. different teams are responsible for different URLs)
- a public dashboard page with what’s up and what’s down
- alerts (email/slack/twilio) when a site goes down
- time series graphics for each URL (not required)
After going through like 50 different tools, I found only one that was simple enough and did what I wanted: Statping by Hunterlong.
It even has a mobile app, Slack notifications and can be set up in minutes thanks to its Docker image.
