# How do you monitor your vps uptime?



## researchlabs (May 24, 2014)

I tried uptimerobot and statuscake, the first one is still telling me that a site of my own is online while the domain is expired and totally down since one month ago, the second one think that a server that I monitor thru ip is down since a week ago when it's actually up and working fine.

Do you know any reliable method?


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## kcaj (May 24, 2014)

I use UptimeRobot and find it reliable. Other than that I use my own Observium installation but wouldn't really consider it reliable.


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## WebSearchingPro (May 24, 2014)

Well, statuscake does ping tests I believe it also caches DNS resolutions which would be why this happened in your case. Their paid option has a live content testing feature that would have resulted in a proper alert.

Now for the false down, its likely a reactive firewall (CSF/LFD on cPanel) ended up blocking the IP after many requests/pings in a short period of time, I've had this happen in the past for http tests. For ping tests if you are using cPanel hosting, your provider may have opted to block ICMP.


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## researchlabs (May 24, 2014)

I don't use cPanel but Vesta panel, but this kinda problems are not within my reach now, I have to do experience.

I'll take a look to observium.


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## jvkz (May 24, 2014)

We use monitor.us

Best thing about it is you can monitor ram, cpu, bandwidth usage in real time from any browser and last 24 hour monitoring plan is free too.


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## MannDude (May 24, 2014)

NodePing and Observium


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## tonyg (May 24, 2014)

I use xymon for uptime and server health in addition to a custom bash script for just uptime monitoring and notification.


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## VMBox (May 24, 2014)

Not so much for VPS, but our whole infrastructure we use Nodeping and have Pingdom alerts as a backup.

I much prefer Nodeping over Pingdom though.


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## Nett (May 24, 2014)

Nodequery


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## gonggo (May 24, 2014)

port-monitor.com - 1 min interval

sentineltower.com (invite only) - 1 min interval

nodequery - 3 min interval


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## HalfEatenPie (May 25, 2014)

observium, cacti, and munin.  

I'm currently thinking about moving over to opennms but I haven't taken the time yet to fully investigate it.


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## GreenHostBox (May 25, 2014)

When I had a VPS, I used to use StatusCake and UptimeRobot. They're both very reliable in terms of their free plan in my opinion.


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## DomainBop (May 25, 2014)

Internal:

1. Observium

2. N2 Monitoring

3. Zabbix

4. Webmin's built-in status monitoring (useful for auto restarting crashed services in the middle of the night)

5. Custom bash script that monitor's Apache/server load and will auto restart Apache if load is over xx.xx for x minutes (useful for when a server is attacked by a bunch of random evil attack bots)

6. Mojeda/ServerStatus script installed on various VPS's on every continent (useful for a quick visual check)

External:

1. Monitor.us (free version <--30 minute checks mean it's already old news when they send out alerts  )

2. StatusCake (paid version)

Big Brother:

1. OVH/Kimsufi's RTM monitoring servers there

2. CloudVPS N2 monitoring things there


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## kcaj (May 26, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> 1. OVH/Kimsufi's RTM monitoring servers there


Apparently Kimsufi don't use the OVH RTM tool, they only ping the server to check it's online. I can't see it running on my Kimsufi.


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## DomainBop (May 26, 2014)

1e10 said:


> Apparently Kimsufi don't use the OVH RTM tool, they only ping the server to check it's online. I can't see it running on my Kimsufi.


Kimsufi uses RTM.  It's installed at /usr/local/rtm (on Debian) and runs a cron job every 60 seconds.  The run time is only a second when the cron runs so you probably won't notice it in a list of running processes.

If you check your syslog you should see a bunch of entries that look like this:


```
May 26 12:05:01 marseille /USR/SBIN/CRON[15790]: 
(root) CMD (/usr/local/rtm/bin/rtm 57 > /dev/null 2> /dev/null)
```


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## kcaj (May 26, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> Kimsufi uses RTM.  It's installed at /usr/local/rtm (on Debian) and runs a cron job every 60 seconds.  The run time is only a second when the cron runs so you probably won't notice it in a list of running processes.
> 
> If you check your syslog you should see a bunch of entries that look like this:
> 
> ...


Ah yes, will take a look at the scripts in there now.

I had asked on the forum yesterday but was told only ping is checked.


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## WSWD (May 28, 2014)

Oh...you don't even want to get me started on Statuscake.  Complete and utter load of crap.  Here's a nice lengthy thread I started over on WHT:  http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1355681

I have been with Nodeping for a few months now, and absolutely love them.  I started getting a few false positives about a week ago, but Shawn (the owner?) worked with me, and I believe we have things resolved now.  It was just a matter of increasing the ping response time to 15 seconds.  Apparently one server was not responding to certain Nodeping test nodes in a timely manner.

Aside from that, I have never had a false positive with them, and have never had them miss an outage.  Been very happy since I switched.


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## Mid (May 28, 2014)

hyperspin.com

not used them, but my provider used (and still uses) them when I was on shared hosting

pricing seems to be moderate on 3 min+ intervals


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## DomainBop (May 28, 2014)

WSWD said:


> Oh...you don't even want to get me started on Statuscake.  Complete and utter load of crap.  Here's a nice lengthy thread I started over on WHT:  http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1355681


You must be mistaken.  StatusCake is 100% accurate and never has any problems.

*Fatal error*: Uncaught exception 'MongoCursorTimeoutException' with message '176.227.201.226:27017: Read timed out after reading 0 bytes, waited for 30.000000 seconds' in /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php:12 Stack trace: #0 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php(12): MongoCursor->rewind() #1 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/ListSites.php(74): GetHourlyPerformance('157897') #2 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Status.php(142): ListSites() #3 {main} thrown in */home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php* on line *12*


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## markjcc (May 28, 2014)

I like to use statuscake as it provides a public access page for any new potential clients to see


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## WSWD (May 29, 2014)

DomainBop said:


> You must be mistaken.  StatusCake is 100% accurate and never has any problems.
> 
> *Fatal error*: Uncaught exception 'MongoCursorTimeoutException' with message '176.227.201.226:27017: Read timed out after reading 0 bytes, waited for 30.000000 seconds' in /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php:12 Stack trace: #0 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php(12): MongoCursor->rewind() #1 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/ListSites.php(74): GetHourlyPerformance('157897') #2 /home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Status.php(142): ListSites() #3 {main} thrown in */home/Sites/StatusCake/App/Workfloor/Get.Hourly.Performance.php* on line *12*



Doh!!!  My bad!


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## HostXNow (Jun 2, 2014)

Been using Pingdom for years.


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## clouds4india (Jun 3, 2014)

Well we prefer pingdom http://www.pingdom.com/

There are a few good providers in the below link though

http://www.servermom.org/useful-free-uptime-monitoring-services-server/1175/


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## VENETX (Jun 5, 2014)

We use JetServer Monitoring it comes in handy specially with WHMCS


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## barryherne (Jun 5, 2014)

Try the tool Anturis. It does a lot of various monitoring operations and it is surely easier than Nagios and cheaper than Pingdom.


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## gabe_5gbps (Jun 5, 2014)

use monitor.us


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## rupe (Jun 5, 2014)

gabe_5gbps said:


> use monitor.us


Just gave it a look and signed up to try it out. I then noticed that it doesn't use any secure connection at all, not even for signing in - tyring HTTPS just gives one an error page 

So that's not going on any of my fave lists. As far as I'm concerned there is just no excuse for any web service not to have secure logins in at the very least.

Oh, and $9 for a load test that you can get for free (loadimpact.com - actually 2.5 x more simulated users too).


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## Neo (Jun 7, 2014)

Statuscake/Uptimerobot/Observium


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## Schultz (Jun 8, 2014)

Pingdom has served me very well for the last few years. Love it!


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## W3Space (Jun 12, 2014)

statuscake is nice..


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## JFSG (Jun 13, 2014)

We've been using StatusCake and frankly, quite happy with them except for their virtually non-existent support.


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