Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Serverless JoymonOnline.in - Monitoring up and downtime of web sites

Side effects of Serverless

One of the side effect of Serverless is that is has so many moving parts and we need to monitor the health of all the services consumed by our application. In the case of JoymonOnline.in, there is no money involved but may be slight reputation loss when people sees the site down. How can this guy solve our problems in distributed systems if he can't make his site up all the time?

But that is not the case with real time web apps which brings revenue to the organization. Such scenarios demand the need for monitoring the health of third party services. Ideally we should design the system to switch to another alternative if possible. But at minimum we should know what is going wrong in the system.

JoymonOnline.in uses GitHub pages to host static content as it is HTML app developed using AngularJS framework. It is good to monitor the health of site as is.

Choosing monitoring service - Freemium

Freemium is a relatively new term in SaaS. When vendors sell Software as a Service, they often include a free tier to do all the basic things. For higher usage they start billing. There are many freemium services for web site/service monitoring too. One of such service is UptimeRobot. It checks the website in 5 min interval and informs us about downtime. It is very easy to setup. Only downside is it accepts only custom credentials. Not integrated with Google or Facebook logins.


There are many other services like this. Of course this is best otherwise I would not have used it :) . A list is given below.

https://github.com/lexoyo/Monitoshi - Includes the source code and a free hosted instance.
https://visualping.io/pricing - Only 2 checks /day
http://mashable.com/2010/04/09/free-uptime-monitoring/#FBROURLfQkqR
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/monitor-website-up-downtime-30-free-web-services-and-tools/

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