Faced with the constant challenge of monitoring the health and availability of our websites and web applications, our agency had to find an effective solution. The diversity and scale of our 'park' of sites led us to look for a systematic method of monitoring their status, whether it was a Drupal site under active maintenance or an older static site requiring little maintenance.
There are a multitude of website monitoring tools available. We have established our selection criteria for the perfect monitoring tool:
- Affordable with a non-exponential pricing model, suitable for monitoring more than 100 sites.
- Ability to monitor HTTP / HTTPS, including sending custom headers.
- Ease of use and efficiency.
- Availability of an API for future needs.
Our choice fell on Updown.io, which has excelled in meeting our expectations after a year of use.
Created in 2012 by Adrien Rey-Jarthon in Paris, France, as a side-project, it immediately piqued Gilles' interest. We love side-projects!
The pricing model based on credits (1 credit = 1 request) appealed to us. It allows us to monitor a large number of sites within our budget. We've also realised that we don't need detailed alerts for all our projects. Some are checked every hour, while for others a 10-minute interval is sufficient.
Updown.io's user interface is a model of simplicity and efficiency.
👉 Discover Updown.io (via our referral link, you get 100K free credits; so do we).
Health checks page
You can monitor the home page or another key page on your website, but it would be ideal if each application/website had a dedicated URL for 'health checks', enabling you to test the overall functionality of the application (database, indexing service, workers, etc.).
Free alternative: Upptime
An alternative discovered later is the Upptime project. This ingenious idea relies solely on Github Actions, Github Pages and Github Issues to manage incidents and alerts. For this idea alone, it's well worth the diversions.
Monitoring recurring tasks :
We plan to improve the monitoring of our scheduled or recurring tasks (cronjobs). We are currently evaluating the open source Healthchecks project as an alternative to services such as Oh Dear, which are too expensive for widespread use.
In conclusion, the simplest solutions are often the best. Constant monitoring down to the second is not always necessary. Centralising our monitoring has given us greater efficiency and peace of mind.
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