TL;DR you’re never done with Let’s encrypt: once your servers are secure, you must ensure they stay that way. Let’s encrypt is a no brainer: this initiative benefits us all, with free domain-validated certificates. It’s easy to setup and free. There’s probably automatic installation for your web server of choice, the community behind it can help, and tutorials are everywhere. Then you head to https://
In this post, we will set up a simple SSL certificate expiry monitoring, using cron, ssl-cert-check script and a fail-safe provided by an external service, healthchecks.io.
It was in your TodoList: install the SSL certificate. So you’ve setup your SSL certificate on the web server. It’s quite trendy to use SSL. Google will give you a modest ranking bump, some users will feel safer, all is good. You have even tested your configuration with Qualys, got you an A+. Good job: most got a C, even banks. Now what? What will happen when your cert is about to expire? Your CA will send an email to renew your cert. But maybe someone in the accounting dept will get that email.
When your software goes down, there are two audiences that need to know about it. One: the people who are going to get frustrated and blame you for the inconvenience. Two: the people who can fix the problem. The first audience doesn’t need to know the details of the problem – they just need to know that you’re on top of fixing it, and how long they can expect to wait before full functionality is restored (insofar as you can make a realistic estimate about that).
If you care about the uptime status of your website or SaaS application, there are two really great pieces of content shared last month that you should look into. One is an article on continuous testing from Parasoft Corporation, featured on DZone. The other is a recorded presentation on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) by Expected Behavior, from the Full Stack Toronto conference.
Have you ever wondered if your end-users are truly satisfied with your web applications? Would you like to get accurate insight into end-user experience for better business decisions that will impact your bottom line? ~With Site24x7 Real User Monitoring you can! Get ready to gain real-time visibility into end-user experience ( for ALL users, browsers, devices and geographies) and behind-the-scenes performance for your web application.
One of the biggest responsibilities of system administrators and DevOps professionals is ensuring networks are always functioning properly. Network configuration management used to be a simple task. Watch resource usage and make the appropriate tweaks when the occasional traffic spike occurred. Since then, the rise of agile principles within the DevOps field has required system administrators to adapt to rapid shifts in their field.
When healthchecks.io started to receive more than 1 request per second, it became clear I could not just go on carelessly restarting web servers after code deploys. For a monitoring service, it would be bad form to miss even a few HTTP requests. And, going forward, if the server gets busier, the problem only becomes bigger.
PagerDuty is a well-known incident management system. It provides alerting, on-call scheduling, escalation policies and incident tracking. If you use or plan on using PagerDuty, you can can integrate it with your healthchecks.io account in few simple steps!
I needed a tool to alert me when my cron jobs silently fail. There is already a number of existing services for this, but it seemed like a fun thing to build myself. So I present to you: healthchecks.io. I am using this myself and it has already been useful for me a couple times. Say, a seemingly benign code change in one service causes my batch job to fail 12 hours later, in the middle of night.
