Healthchecks.io pinging API has always been based on UUIDs. Each Check in the system has its own unique and immutable UUID. To signal a start, a failure, or a particular exit status, clients can add more bits after the UUID: This is conceptually simple and has worked quite well. It requires no additional authentication. The UUID value is the authentication, and the UUID “address space” is so vast nobody is going to find valid ping URLs by random guessing any time soon.

I am currently trialing pgmetrics and pgDash for monitoring PostgreSQL databases. Here are my notes on it. pgmetrics is a command-line tool you point at a PostgreSQL cluster and it spits out statistics and diagnostics in a text or JSON format. It is a standalone binary written in Go, and it is open source. Here is a sample pgmetrics report. Rapidloop, the company that develops pgmetrics, also runs pgDash – a web service that collects reports generated by pgmetrics and displays them in a web UI.