Application Monitoring Tool

Hi,

Not sure if this sort of thing is allowable on here, so if not, just let me know and I’ll remove it.

In my role, I have been responsible for managing the various environments we use. One the systems I have been involved with was comprised of several applications, apis, databases etc. Each of these components are integrated in some way.

When one of these parts goes down, it can cause a knock-on effect on other components. When an issue is reported, it can take time to work out which component has gone down.

With that, one of tools I usually create and put in place is some sort of monitoring tool. In the past, I’ve written tailored solutions for the area I’m working in.

I thought I ought to write something flexible, something that allows someone to quickly configure the components they’d like to monitor. I’m not claiming this is something unique or new. There are plenty of such open-source and commercial packages readily available. But, now and then, it’s nice to do something yourself and it gave me a chance to learn more about Node.js and React.

If you’re interested, I wrote a tool that will check websites, web-apps, APIs and servers are available and respond within the expected time. You can find it here. I should add, this is completely free and open source.

If you do try it, I’d be grateful for any feedback…

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Well, it looks like you trying to implement something that already exists… take look at Zabbix:

There are tons of other application monitoring tools… not sure if you should write your own…

Yeah, there are loads and I never claimed it’s an original idea.
I don’t see why that shouldn’t stop my writing my own though.
I’ve been at places where some of these commercial packages have been tried to be introduced. Quite often, they’re intrusive in that JavaScript has to be embedded in webpages, or agents have to be installed on servers. In fact, it was the server agents that stopped adoption of one package as architecture governance wouldn’t allow it.
I wanted to build something lightweight, unobtrusive and gave quick feedback. Plus, it gave me chance to learn more about Node and React.

The answer is “agentless application monitoring”
Things like JMX, SNMP etc.

These “Agents” are already in every OS, Web Server, Database and in most popular applications. You should just enable them and use some tool to query them, that’s it

Where are you going with this? I wrote something and you say I shouldn’t have wrote it? Now going further with agentless solutions. Yeah, I know stuff is out there, I could’ve researched more and found something else instead of knocking up something myself. I answered a simple “what do you use q?” on here. Maybe Zabbix shouldn’t have bothered because there’s already solutions out there? Does it really matter that I wrote my own? I wanted a single dashboard that checked several asset types and I got it.
But, in a lot of places different groups manage different things. You can’t get access to certain in-built monitoring tools because of access. I wrote something that met my needs, nothing more.

Oh, it looks like you have a site aggregating remote job opportunities.

That’s original. Why bother? Why go to effort putting something together when there’s loads of job sites, remote and site based?

Why? Because you wanted to? You feel like like you’d get something out of it? Someone else may benefit from it?

In my original post I acknowledged, “There are plenty of such open-source and commercial packages readily available. But, now and then, it’s nice to do something yourself and it gave me a chance to learn more about Node.js and React.”, yet you chose to list existing solutions as though I wasn’t aware that my idea wasn’t original and suggest ‘why bother’.

This monitoring tool can be deployed on linux or windows server?

Yes, as long as you have Node.js installed.

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Does this tool also tells us, if we have load balanced webservers, which app node is down and which is running currently?

Only if you can call balanced nodes directly. For example, if you have an EU node, a US node and global node which does nothing more that route to EU and US. Then, you need to monitor all three. Just monitoring the global node won’t tell you which underlying node had gone down.

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