Interested in adding scheduled job monitoring (dead man’s switch) to the existing monitoring and alerting framework you are already using (Nagios, Sensu, Zenoss, Zabbix, Monit, Pingdom, Montastic, Ruxit, and the like)?
Last month I wrote about how I use Cronitor.io to monitor scheduled events with an example using an SNS Topic and AWS Lambda.
This week I spent a few hours building a simple web service that enables any polling-based monitor software or service to automatically support alerting when a target event has not occurred in a desired timeframe.
The new web service is built on infrastructure technologies that are reliably maintained and scaled by Amazon:
- API Gateway
- AWS Lambda
- DynamoDB
- CloudFront
- Route53
- CloudWatch
The source code is about a page long and the web service API is as trivial as it gets; but the functionality it adds to monitoring services is quite powerful and hugely scalable.
Integration requires these simple steps:
Step 1: There is no step one! There is no registration, no setup, and no configuration of the new web service for your use.
Step 2: Hit one URL when your target event occurs.
Step 3: Tell your existing monitoring system to poll another URL and to alert you when it fails.
Result: When your scheduled task misses an appointment and doesn’t check in, the second URL monitored by your software will start returning a failure code, and you will be alerted.
Intrigued?
I’m still working on the blog post to introduce the web service, but would love to have some folks test it out this week and give feedback.
If you are interested, drop me an email and mention:
-
The monitoring/alerting frameworks you currently use
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The type of scheduled activities you would like to monitor (cron job, SNS topic, Lambda function, web page view, email receipt, …)
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The frequency of the target events (every 10 seconds, every 10 years, …)
Even if you don’t want to do testing this week, I’d love to hear your answers to the above three points, through email or in the comments below.