monitoring Archives | Lee Willis https://www.leewillis.co.uk/tag/monitoring/ Wed, 18 Jan 2017 10:42:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 Uptime monitoring with Uptime Robot https://www.leewillis.co.uk/uptime-monitoring-uptime-robot/ https://www.leewillis.co.uk/uptime-monitoring-uptime-robot/#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2017 10:42:51 +0000 https://www.leewillis.co.uk/?p=920 The rest of this series has mostly covered things you’d use when building a site. Once you’ve finished building though, and your new site has gone live there are plenty more things you need to do. There’s hosting, SSL certificates, CDNs, and a … Continue reading

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The rest of this series has mostly covered things you’d use when building a site. Once you’ve finished building though, and your new site has gone live there are plenty more things you need to do. There’s hosting, SSL certificates, CDNs, and a variety of other services that only apply when a site is in production.

If you’re doing things properly you’ll almost certainly want to monitor your live site.

There are a multitude of things that you can monitor.  I’ve touched on monitoring previously where I talked about how I use sentry.io to track application errors. You might also want to:

  • track user behaviour (I wrote about using Google Analytics’ advanced analytics monitoring in a recent post)
  • monitor and analyze server performance (I use Newrelic)
  • analyze deep language internals / code-paths (Blackfire is pretty awesome for PHP).

For me though, the most basic, and essential need is to understand whether your application is up and running. I’ve used Uptime Robot for this for a while. They have a free tier that provides everything you need for day-to-day monitoring. This provides up to 50 different monitors, checked every 5 minutes, with email alerts when sites go down.

Their standard HTTP monitors checks if the specified URL responded with a positive HTTP response. They also offer keyword monitors where it will fetch a page and check for the presence or absence of specified keywords.

Once you need to go beyond that, they have a very reasonably priced Pro plan that gives more frequent checking, complex alerting rules, and SMS alerts. Perfect for higher value sites.

For me, UptimeRobot is a perfect example of a service that does one thing, and does it well.

  1. Stuff I’ve used
  2. Error tracking with Sentry
  3. Autotrack for Google Analytics
  4. WordPress performance tracking with Time-stack
  5. Enforce user password strength
  6. WYSIWYG with Summernote
  7. Backing up your Laravel app
  8. Adding Google Maps to your Laravel application
  9. Activity logging in Laravel
  10. Image handling in PHP with Intervention Image
  11. Testing Laravel emails with MailThief
  12. Assessing software health
  13. IP Geolocation with MaxMind’s GeoLite2
  14. Uptime monitoring with Uptime Robot
  15. Product tours with Hopscotch
  16. Background processing for WordPress
  17. Using oEmbed resources in Laravel

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Error tracking with Sentry https://www.leewillis.co.uk/error-tracking-sentry/ https://www.leewillis.co.uk/error-tracking-sentry/#respond Thu, 13 Oct 2016 09:00:42 +0000 http://www.leewillis.co.uk/?p=795 One of the projects I’ve worked on recently is a rebuild of workflow system for a large business. The system processes large volumes of data 24 hours a day. It’s important that any errors with the system are flagged, tracked and … Continue reading

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One of the projects I’ve worked on recently is a rebuild of workflow system for a large business. The system processes large volumes of data 24 hours a day. It’s important that any errors with the system are flagged, tracked and investigated as soon as possible.

Another of the projects is a personal project I’m launching for Hill Blogging. This service is now in beta release with a handful of beta testers. I’m keen to identify, and squash any bugs without relying on beta testers reporting them.

Both of these projects use the Laravel PHP Framework (although neither Sentry.io, nor this post are Laravel specific!). So, I set about looking for a solution that would automatically track, and alert me to errors with Laravel. Any solution had to give me enough information to identify and start fixing the error.

On both of these projects I settled on Sentry.io. It’s a SaaS product that describes itself as:

Real-time error tracking [that] gives you insight into production deployments and information to reproduce and fix crashes.

This is pretty much everything I was looking for.

screenshot-2016-10-12-19-46-04

Sentry offers a Laravel integration out of the box. Simply install it, attach it to your project, and set up your project key. It’s a really straightforward setup. Once it’s set up, then any exceptions thrown in your code will get logged to Sentry, together with a backtrace. You’ll also be alerted to the new error.

You can take things further if you want by logging additional information with the exceptions if you need to, but the basic setup is sufficient to get you going.

Beyond Laravel, Sentry has libraries for common frameworks, and client libraries for most mainstream libraries, so it should be relatively easy to get going with.

There’s a range of pricing options depending on your likely error volume (zero – right!?) and users. The free tier is a great way to get started and offers support for 5,000 events/day (~150,000/month) at time of writing.

For me, it’s already more than proved its worth, not only in production, but also during development / staging phases of projects, helping me get straight to the broken code without having to rely on vague bug reports from users.

It’s worth noting that there are other similar services. In my investigations, I also looked at Rollbar and Airbrake – they may work better for you depending on your own circumstances.

  1. Stuff I’ve used
  2. Error tracking with Sentry
  3. Autotrack for Google Analytics
  4. WordPress performance tracking with Time-stack
  5. Enforce user password strength
  6. WYSIWYG with Summernote
  7. Backing up your Laravel app
  8. Adding Google Maps to your Laravel application
  9. Activity logging in Laravel
  10. Image handling in PHP with Intervention Image
  11. Testing Laravel emails with MailThief
  12. Assessing software health
  13. IP Geolocation with MaxMind’s GeoLite2
  14. Uptime monitoring with Uptime Robot
  15. Product tours with Hopscotch
  16. Background processing for WordPress
  17. Using oEmbed resources in Laravel

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