from Hacker News

Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down

by nhm on 12/5/16, 11:32 PM with 53 comments

  • by Dobbs on 12/6/16, 12:14 AM

    From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph.

    Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don't have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren't dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your outage is that AWS is having issues. Now your site and your monitoring is down.

    Much better to outsource to people who obsess over doing this right and making sure they are properly redundant.

  • by falcolas on 12/6/16, 12:18 AM

    And I'm sure Lambda will never go down. Right? Right??

    (It has. Completely and silently stopped processing against Kinesis queues for a few hours recently. Guess what AWS Step is built on?)

  • by tjholowaychuk on 12/6/16, 1:09 AM

    I wrote Apex Ping (https://apex.sh/ping/) for those who want more features and/or don't want to waste the time to save a few bucks :D.

  • by tymm on 12/6/16, 12:48 AM

    I wrote something similar in bash and put it into a docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/simplepush/alerta

    Just running this docker image on a server you want to monitor is enough.

    Instead of Twilio it uses Simplepush (https://simplepush.io).

  • by dmourati on 12/6/16, 5:06 AM

    Isn't the better plan to use Lambda instead of your servers?

  • by justinc8687 on 12/6/16, 8:32 AM

    I use https://aremysitesup.com/ and I've found it really helpful as it one of the few inexpensive services I've found that will CALL me if things are down. SMS is nice, but I use the do-not-disturb feature on my phone in the evenings, and at least on iOS, the only way to punch through that is with a call from a number on my favorites list. This meets that need very well and I've found the service to be quite spot on alerting me (both when I had one instance of things hitting the fan, but also during scheduled maintenance). I'd highly recommend.

  • by intrasight on 12/6/16, 1:40 AM

    The advantage of this type of cloud solution over a one-size-fits-all cloud service like Pingdom (which I use) is flexibility. You can configure cloud agents to perform nearly any task you can envision.

  • by gravypod on 12/6/16, 1:49 AM

    I don't know if everyone knows this but you can make texts using email.

    Most providers have SMTP gateways for SMS services. Verizon runs @vtext.com

  • by social_quotient on 12/6/16, 3:48 AM

    Note: instead of dynamodb for the lookup mentioned at the bottom, maybe consider https://aws.amazon.com/athena/ for an s3 query

  • by cagataygurturk on 12/6/16, 4:59 PM

    Route53 Health Checks & SNS can send sms message without any Lambda involved.

  • by theparanoid on 12/6/16, 8:20 AM

    I've used montastic.com for years. 2min setup to fire and forget.