How Do You Monitor Your Websites

@Kelley
Oh, that’s a fun question! It’s hard to narrow down where to start, but here goes.

The backend is custom-built in C++. The website backend uses PHP on a framework I created years ago, and the frontend is built on another UI framework I developed.

I’ve been working on it for three years, two of which have been full-time with long hours, including weekends.

I know it sounds intense, but I wanted everything to function a certain way. For instance, all the data is live, so if you’re viewing a page with monitors or looking at a monitor’s data, you know it’s current, even if another team member is making changes.

Hope this answers your question!

I run self-hosted UptimeKuma on a cheap VPS, along with self-hosted Plausible for stats.

I use ohdear.app for uptime and performance monitoring and sentry.io for error tracking.

@Briar
We know it’s you, Jamie.

Finley said:
@Briar
We know it’s you, Jamie.

I’m not Jamie. I don’t own Oh Dear, I just use it.

I prefer BetterStack. It monitors websites and apps.

I track user traffic with Plausible and use CloudWatch to monitor site health, but I’m considering using Sentry for that purpose.

Dane said:
I track user traffic with Plausible and use CloudWatch to monitor site health, but I’m considering using Sentry for that purpose.

Just to clarify, I’m mentioning this mainly because I didn’t put much thought into it; this shouldn’t be taken as strong recommendations.

You could create your own monitoring tool! UptimeRobot is cool but seems overpriced for what it offers. I think it’s fun to have a tool tailored to my needs. For example, mine includes a client portal and allows me to access individual logs, errors, and updates easily. It’s not too difficult to set up and can be customized in many ways.

@Haru
How did you start building this tool?

Kelley said:
@Haru
How did you start building this tool?

Was this as a Django project? I’m not sure what you meant by that.

I have a Python script that checks /health endpoints every hour. I also have a desktop app that shows analytics for other projects, and one feature monitors data from my Python script.

I use self-hosted Umami.

It’s a bit confusing whether you want to monitor or monetize, but for monitoring, UptimeRobot (free), Sentry (free), and Pingdom (paid, but works well) are good options. Usually, I check if it’s online or if the /healthcheck endpoint is functioning, like checking Redis connections.