hostnag

Uptime monitoring

Websites, APIs and anything that answers on a port, checked every minute from up to four places, with a failure confirmed before anyone is paged.

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Included on every plan.

PlansFreeProBusiness
What Uptime monitoring catches
What breakshostnag
A host goes downYes

How it works

  1. 01

    Add the address

    A URL for HTTP, or a host and port for TCP: a VPN gateway, a mail server, a database, a game server. Private and loopback addresses are refused; hostnag watches from the cloud.

  2. 02

    Say what a good answer looks like

    A status code range, a keyword that must be present or absent (case-insensitive unless you say otherwise), a regex, up to ten JSON assertions on the body, a redirect policy and a latency threshold.

  3. 03

    Pick where and how often

    Every 5 minutes from one location on Free; every 1 minute from up to 3 (Pro) or 4 (Business) of US East, US West, Frankfurt, Tokyo.

  4. 04

    Down is confirmed, then you are told

    A failed run is not an outage. hostnag needs 2 confirmations, a second location or a second consecutive run, before it opens an episode and nags your channels. A recovery notice follows when the host is back.

What you'll be told

What you get told

  1. [Critical] https://www.example.com/ is down

    Down from 2 of 3 locations (US East, Frankfurt). Last error: unexpected_status: 503.

    HTTP

  2. [Warning] https://www.example.com/ is responding slowly (2400 ms)

    https://www.example.com/ is up but slow: 2400 ms median across locations, above the threshold you set.

    HTTP

  3. [Warning] https://www.example.com/ p95 is 1840 ms over 24 h (SLO 800 ms)

    https://www.example.com/ answered within 1840 ms for 95% of 96 checks in the last 24 h, above the 800 ms you set. It is not down, only slower than you promised.

    HTTP

  4. [Recovered] https://www.example.com/ is back up after 1 h 15 min

    https://www.example.com/ answered again from every location. It was down for 1 h 15 min.

    HTTP

Sample alerts, rendered by the same code that writes your email and Slack messages.

Settings

Expected status
a code or a range, 200 to 299 by default
Keyword
present or absent, case-insensitive by default, regex optional
JSON assertions
up to 10 path rules: equals, contains, exists, is absent, greater than, less than
Method and body
GET or POST with a body and custom headers (headers are stored in plaintext; the form says so)
Redirects
follow, or fail on any redirect
Latency
a per-run threshold that marks the monitor degraded, and a daily p95 SLO
Timeout
15s
Interval
5 min on Free, 1 min on Pro and Business

Questions

Do you ping with ICMP?

No. hostnag watches from the cloud without an installed collector, so "ping" means TCP reachability on a port you name.

Will I get paged when one location has a bad minute?

No. A failure needs 2 confirmations, from a second location or a second consecutive run, before an episode opens.

Can I watch a private host?

Not from outside. A host the cloud cannot reach can report its own status through a status report URL, fed by the Beacon script or your own scheduler.

Related

Alerting and status pagesEvery alert routed to the right channel at the right severity, held during quiet hours and maintenance, escalated until it's acknowledged.Heartbeat monitoringA minted URL for anything that runs on its own schedule: a job that goes quiet becomes an alert, not a surprise weeks later.

Add a host. Hear about it first.

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