External Monitoring and Alerting

[Alan Johnson]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Kenny Lussier <klussier at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have looked at Keynote/RedAlert, Gomez, and a few other third parties.
> However, I can't help but think that I am better off doing it myself. My
> thought was to get virtual servers from various hosting companies (Linode,
> Vereo, GoDaddy, etc.) so that they are geographically and network
> diversified, and deploy something like ZenOSS, Zabbix, or GroundworkIT on
> each to do the testing and centralize the reporting. Does anyone have any
> thoghts on this? Has anyone done it before (I'm sure someone has)?
> Discussion anybody?
>

I expect 3 VMs to cost you more than a third party service for basic HTTP
uptime based on pattern matches.  We use alertsite.com for such things, but
the cost depends on the number of servers you want to monitor and the
complexity of the monitors.  We just have alertsite check a single URL for
a single pattern, and that is pretty cheap (<$20/m? maybe?).  It quickly
gets more expense as you add URLs, but it does 5 minute frequency from 3
location with configurable excalation and black outs for expected down
time.  I get emailed for any hiccup from any location and paged if all 3
fail a couple of times in a row.  They also do automatic traceroutes on a
failure and email daily uptime and response time stats.  You can run adhoc
reports on their site with a good amount of flexibility.

Probably they do a lot more, but this is just how we have it setup.

I have long considered using our remote virtual servers by just enabling the
MON package via webmin.  Not much effort there, but it would not do
everything described above out of the box and we have a third party
requirement from a customer anyway.  Again, if you don't already have the
virtual servers for other reasons, you will probably find this more
expensive than a basic monitoring service, not to mention the overhead of
managing 3 more remote servers and vendors.
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