Ask HN: What are some good lightweight server monitoring services?

[eremzeit]

I'm one-person team and I'm just looking for a service that will ping my servers at some interval and send me an email or text if the response doesn't match some pre-configured match parameters.

Pager-duty would work but 10 bucks a month seems too expensive. I know there must be better alternatives out there.

update: Looks like I misunderstood pager duty. It doesn't handle the uptime checking; it just manages notifications and escalation.

[bigiain]

I'm happy with UptimeRobot, but they're not a heap less than $10/month.

If it's not really worth $10/month to you, do you really care that much? By the time you've "rolled your own" to save $10/month, how much time will you have spent and how close to the reliability of a bespoke service can you get for significantly less money? A cron job and a perl script or two on a $3/month vps will let you _say_ you're monitoring your servers, but if your monitor is less reliable that your web servers it's just going to wake you up on weekends and get ignored...

[stephenr]

https://pingability.com has a free plan that will test once per hour if thats often enough for you. $10 a month will give you once every 5 minutes.

[cdvonstinkpot]

http://monitority.com/

[eremzeit]

Interesting. Though, why when I activate my account does an entity called "Bllion Signup Wizard" ask me to grant access to my gmail contacts?