Upptime – GitHub actions powered uptime monitor | Hacker News Reader

Upptime – GitHub actions powered uptime monitor

github.com

27 pointskodisha16 comments

I've been a satisfied customer of https://uptimerobot.com/ for years, they have a very generous free tier (50 monitors @ 5m) and they have been extremely reliable, friendly and non-spammy as a service.

Same, they've been absolutely wonderful. I think I've had monitors set up for like 5 years now, never really log in, just get the email and respond. It's solid.

But doesn’t GH Actions have terrible uptime? Shouldn’t your uptime monitor itself have good uptime?

That was exactly my first thought too. We're using Azure Pipelines rather than Actions, but I think a lot of the infrastructure is the same, and it's one of the least reliable parts of our stack.

Isn't this abusing GitHub Actions?

Yeah, actions shouldn't be used like this, as per their terms[0]:

> Additionally, Actions should not be used for:

> * cryptomining;

> * using our servers to disrupt, or to gain or to attempt to gain unauthorized access to, any service, device, data, account, or network (other than those authorized by the GitHub Bug Bounty program);

> * the provision of a stand-alone or integrated application or service offering Actions or any elements of Actions for commercial purposes;

> * any activity that places a burden on our servers, where that burden is disproportionate to the benefits provided to users (for example, don't use Actions as a content delivery network or as part of a serverless application, but a low benefit Action could be ok if it’s also low burden); or

> * any other activity unrelated to the production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are used.

Specifically the next to last point, shouldn't be used "as a part of a serverless application".

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-additio...

Does this apply if you run this action on your own hosted runners?

Same rule, emphasis my own

> any activity that places a burden on our servers

I would assume not

Yes, it is. As was already established the few times similar projects popped up here. I'm looking forward to the eventual blogposts complaining about the free tier getting more restrictive.

This is exactly what I think when I see projects like this. How does a project this dumb end up with 6.8K stars!

People like free stuff

Azure monitor ping web tests are free and unlimited [0] and wont violate any terms of service, plus you can add in much more complex features from servers all over the world if you so wish. This probably sounds like a bit of an advert for Azure, so worth mentioning that there are many other competitors who also offer freemium uptime checker services like uptimerobot.com.

[0] - https://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/monitor/

This has already been submitted here a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25553445

cool! this could probably be coupled with https://try.askgit.com/ to do some simple slicing and dicing queries on the response time history in git (average over a time period, count incidents in a time period, etc)

Now this is serverless.

someone else's server

Reply on news.ycombinator.com