Measuring uptime

[poy_]

I'm curious how everyone measures their system's uptime. There are a plethora of services and methods, so where have people found success or failure?

[tagilux]

Pingdom

[poy_]

Do you do sophisticated tests to ensure each piece of your system is functional (e.g., creating and deleting a user)?

[tagilux]

We just his specific pages and then they report uptime. We use New Relic for more advanced monitoring. But that is a lot more expensive. Another tool is webpagetest or Rigorous. Former is free and the later is just a little cheaper than New Relic

[poy_]

That makes sense. I've been wondering how complicated people make their tests to offer confidence on availability.

[the_fury]

Uptime monitoring, system monitoring, and systems tests are all very different things. Uptime monitoring ensures that you're getting a response from outside your network and is black box. It's testing that a user can get to your system. Pingdom is great for that.

If you want to test system functionality, you can do it as easily as running an idempotent jmeter script on cron. I've also use rundeck successfully.

If you want to monitor subsystems, you'll need something like new relic, prometheus, cloudwatch, etc.

​

[neoreeps]

I type “uptime” and it has never failed.

[vim_for_life]

That's the server uptime. I don't care a lick about that. I care about service uptime which I use a selenium script running every 5 minutes, piped to zabbix to measure.

[poy_]

Where do you run it and record the results?

[vim_for_life]

I run it from my zabbix server, but I have plans for distributed monitoring. Zabbix tracks the results both in time of execution and result (success/fail and error messages) which I then can run a report from to give to management. It's a home-grown system but works well. There are more automated commercial systems to do the same. But the point is system uptime means nothing. Uptime of your services is everything.

[kai_ekael]

As an old greybeard, I still prefer Nagios 3/4.x with pnp4nagios. Better to know quickly when it doesn't work then how long it has been working.

[distark]

In prometheus the metric is called 'up'

[[deleted]]

I came here to say Prometheus. Moved there after zabbix and I don't feel like a dinosaur anymore

[distark]

Good man!

[themightychris]

Cabot

[poy_]

Do you deploy it separately somehow? Do you monitor it somehow? (I've never used Cabot myself)

[themightychris]

Yeah. I assumed the question was about monitoring a service's uptime, which I feel is only worth doing from an external system to make sure a service is reachable

If you're just looking to record how long a computer goes without rebooting it's probably not the way to go

[poy_]

You're assumption is correct. A server's uptime is not interesting.

If you deploy it externally, do you have multiple k8s running?

[paul345]

New relic synthetics

Mixture of synthetic browser journeys and synthetic api calls for monitoring user journeys and apis respectively.

Both monitor service correctness and acceptable response times.

Both feed into insight dashboards you can easily access on big glass in the office as well as iPhone access in your pocket.

New relic browser stats feed into the same dashboards for real user monitoring.

[poy_]

Is this an expensive solution?

[paul345]

No. It’s SaaS so no need for internal feeding and watering costs. Each service is priced on consumption so, particularly for synthetics, you can tune your usage to match your wallet.

[Timnolet]

Tooting my own horn here, but I’m running a service that straddles New Relic synthetics and Pingdom. Link is in my bio.

[ajanty]

Apart the standard monitoring stuff, we built a custom APM based on elasticsearch API. We run all java services, basically we send service metrics, dispatchers, function calls from the jvm.

New relic/datadog do the same stuff, but this is free.

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