Status monitoring my AWS webserver
Somthing I’ve been wanting to do since I first started hosting my own websites on a home server was to implement a uptime monitoring system to alert me if somthing goes down so I can address it in a timley manner. A few months ago I finaly got around to setting it up. Heres hot I did it.
The first thing that I did was set up an account it Uptime Robot (www.uptimerobot.com). The free account, which supports upto 50 monitors and checks as often as every 5 minutes s plenty for my purposes.
Once my Uptime Robot account was set up, I loged into the dashboard and added the recources that I wante tracked:
*Servers are checked every 5 minutes using the ‘ping’ option.
*Websites are checked every 5-15 minutes (depending on how important the site is) using the ‘HTTP(s)’ option.
*Services are checked every 5-15 minutes (depending on how important the service is) using the ‘port’ option.
I also set up emails alerting me of downtime for servers and the most important sites and services.
Now for many this would be fine, but there is one thing that I always wanted in a status monitor that Uptime Robot does not (at this time) offer: a public status page. While looking for a way to implement a public status page using Uptime Robot data I came across StatusPage (https://github.com/nerdbaggy/StatusPage)
Once I had decided on using StatusPage I wet and set up a subdomain on my server. ths consisted of making a folder on my web server that would hold the subdomain’s files, editing Apache’s vhosts.conf file and updating my DNS server (CloudFlare) to direct the subdomain.
I then went and downloaded StatusPage and unpacked it t a folder on my desktop. I needed my Uptime Robot API key, which s easy available from the Uptime Robot dashboard. I inserted this into the statuspage/config.php file. After saving I wet and uploaded all the files to the server.
Visiting the site with a web browser showed that everything was working perfectly.
