Show HN: WebGazer – Simple and Affordable Website Monitoring Service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WebGazer – Simple and Affordable Website Monitoring Service

webgazer.io

65 pointsxtralife35 comments

I currently use https://uptimerobot.com/ (free plan) and I'm happy with it. The free plan seems to offer more than yours (50 alert delivery targets & sites watched, same cadence, same metrics, public status pages included in free tier, including RSS, log exporting etc.). To upgrade to pro would also be 10x cheaper for a similar service-level[1,2]. Why should I switch?

1: https://app.webgazer.io/billing

2: https://uptimerobot.com/pricing

Hi, this is Gokhan from WebGazer Team. Thanks for the comment, we are aware of the availability of cheaper services. As a matter of fact, some of them are the reason we started WebGazer.

Alerting is a basic thing and it is done kind of OK by some others. But true analytics is hard to get, we are still working on providing better reports. As an obvious plus, we provide status pages we produce by the monitoring data collected. This is for not making you depend on another service just for a status page.

Also, we are looking for ways to make WebGazer a complete monitoring and analytics platform. Plans still aren't very clear but server monitoring or client-side analytics are some things we have in mind.

From what I see, the 'true analytics' available are exactly the same as what I'm getting already. The data's available from my current service to download raw if I want to export it to another analytics platform anyway. I already have (free!) public status pages, as do most competitors' offerings, so it's not another service.

I don't mean to shit on your product, it's good! I think you need to be clearer about why I should pay quite so much more for it. At the moment it doesn't seem worth it by a long shot. If you plan to build the platform out into something more featureful, then say that, and give early adopters a discount (so that they're not paying more for services which are currently equivalent). Uptime Robot has been around for 8 years, and they're still giving out early-adopter discounts!

Where do you get your status pages from?

EDIT: I wrote some OSS to email you if a service (like a cronjob) does not check in[0]. Maybe I should add a status page component to it so you can see failed services at a glance, that seems like the right way to do status pages.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/stavros/caduceus

My word I’ve been looking for a self-hosted alternative to Dead Man’s Snitch for ages. Thank you for this!

You're welcome, that's exactly why I made it! Please open an issue if you have any feature requests or notice any bugs!

I use UptimeRobot too. Works fine for me and I get reliable notifications by e-mail when an IP address or domain is unavailable.

Yeah, and they aren't the only one.

Companies like https://hetrixtools.com/pricing/uptime-monitor/ are slightly more expensive but still alot cheaper.

Great idea to come into that space but it's going to be a tough battle.

For our company, we had to create our own status monitoring app (open source). It's been a while and I had a short amount of time to find one.

A few reason for why we built our own:

- almost no SaaS allow companies to make advanced (JSON) checks to the data returned by a status endpoint. For example, we have cron jobs running data imports. To verify that these are still running, a /status endpoint on our app returns the last data import date based on the data imported in the DB. If this delay gets bigger than a threshold then we fire an alert.

- we're in B2B. Our clients need to have access to a status page with the ability to download the list of incidents (for SLA & contractual purposes)

- we need 2 levels of status pages. One for customers and one for our internal teams with access to more monitors

- SaaS providers either give the ability to automatically monitor or to manually manage the status page. There is no ability to do both at the same time

- I wanted something simple. And advanced monitoring systems can definitely do the above, but it's ops hell to setup and maintain. I have other things to do.

I wrote something to help with the first case (it'll email you if your service doesn't check in): https://gitlab.com/stavros/caduceus

Very interesting way to solve it! I like the idea.

We have the idea on the roadmap that will exactly solve the problem you mentioned on the first item of your list. We were having doubts about the use case, your comment got us excited.

It's rare that a customer in your space will give you an actionable product plan. This is a goldmine. (I have had similar needs in the past.)

Do you have a public repo for your app?

https://github.com/nherment/dn5

That was mostly coded over weekends, with no regards to code quality. Note that we still rely on an old version of the implementation to fire alerts, until this one is brought up to speed.

We created WebGazer to provide simple, affordable and mission critical website monitoring service. We are so happy to hear any feedback and ready to improve ourselves.

WebGazer is a website monitoring service checking your website on a regular basis. It notifies you with instant alerts in case of a problem. That way, you have a piece of mind about the status of your service without manually checking it.

You can publish the performance overview of the gazers through WebGazer Status Pages. Status page is simply a gateway to users. Successful companies are now going transparent and removing the wall between users with public announcement pages

Publish performance of your system to users for more transparency.

Update for any ongoing difficulties on the infrastructure (we know everyone has their servers on fire now and then)

Close the gap between your DevOps and audience.

For the future it should be "peace of mind", rather than "piece of mind". English is confusing like that!

Is there a way to configure a check to have to fail across 2 or even 3 locations before being considered down?

Also, didn't see a list of data center locations and providers. Are you multi-provider (AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean).

Before sending down notifications, we validate incidents 4 times from different servers (TBH, not from different locations). List of IP addresses that a WebGazer request might originate from will be available on our docs soon.

The "Sign up" button (in "Growth" plan) doesn't work (in Safari). "SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern."

Hey, thanks for the heads up. It should be fixed now :)

Clicking 'Advanced Settings' when editing a Gazer gives a blank page for me in Firefox.

Sorry, this one was a bit tricky to debug but it should be fixed now :)

Is it possible to monitor specific parts of a page (eg via xpath)?

I have a nightly cron job running that dumps data to the database. On the homepage of the website it says how many new entries were created overnight. If that amount is zero, there's a 99% chance the cron job failed. It would be nice to be notified if the homepage says 0 entries were created overnight.

My next project thank you :)

Can I monitor site performance? TTFB, min/max/average download size across time, etc...?

Currently, our reports focus on timings. Like how long stages (dns resolution, handshake, download etc.) of request takes.

Download size is an interesting idea, note taken. Would you mind if I reached you for details on this?

Also, here is an example of what I mean by request stages timing: https://imgur.com/a/fKsVIc3

Yes, sure, contact me and we can talk about it

"This website is operated by WebGazer, Inc."

Is this a US company? I can not find any other info on the site. How would one go about figuring out if this is a legit company?

In the US, do you have a public online-registry where one can look up company details like address, revenue etc?

Here are the links:

* Terms of Service: https://www.webgazer.io/terms-of-service/

* Privacy Policy: https://www.webgazer.io/privacy-policy/

If you need anything else, we'd be glad to help, just e-mail at info ~at~ webgazer.io.

Edit: We are a Delaware company, I guess you can query on State's website.

Thanks.

For me, living in Europe, it feels kinda strange when I am supposed to enter my credit card details on a page that is kind of anonymous.

Over here, every site has to state the address, business id and other information. And you can look up company history in a central repository.

This is interesting.

With Serverless Function and Serverless Database (Dynamo,Cloud Datastore etc..) setting up something like this would basically take a few minutes.

The biggest value rely lies in the UI and the UX and all the extra stuff that comes with it , like having pretty Analytics .

I have been developing web stuff for about 10 years. The dilemma I experienced about monitoring is that when you do your own monitoring you need to make sure your monitor is working, too. Relying on an external platform sounds saner when I consider this. This is why we consider WebGazer "mission critical".

This has an unfortunate name-clash with eye-tracking software that's been previously featured on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=WebGazer

What does WebGazer offer that does not come for free with netsaint^wnagios^wicinga?

I run icinga for various clients on dedicated VMs for $5/mo each, with unlimited users, notifications and checks - and I still make a nice profit on that.

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