PUSH Checks – Heartbeats and Metrics Monitoring

One of the most requested features we get is the ability to push monitoring results into NodePing. Today, we make good on all those requests and are happy to announce our latest check type, PUSH.

Unlike our other checks, PUSH checks allow your server to push metrics into our system, track the metrics, and receive alerts based on the results. This significantly adds to your ability to monitor services that are not Internet accessible, and monitor additional custom metrics. Our customers running LANs can now get heartbeats and metrics on internal servers like Windows AD controllers. Or, you can monitor metrics that are only relevant to your systems in ways that are specific to your environment. We’ll track and alert on any metric you want to push at us!

Heartbeats and Metrics

PUSH checks are configured to send results on a specific interval and you can configure the check to fail if we haven’t received a pushed result from you. This is the heartbeat functionality.

You can also push us a data payload of metrics with the PUSH check result and configure your check to track those metrics. The check will fail if any configured metric is missing or if the values in the result are outside your configured min/max range.

Metrics are great for keeping an eye on system load, disk free space, or any other service or system metric you can gather on a server and send to us.

PUSH checks are flexible and can be configured to be heartbeat-only, metrics-only, or both.

PUSH Clients

To send us your result (heartbeat or metrics), you’ll need to submit an HTTP POST to NodePing with information about the check and optionally the metrics. Details can be found in our in our PUSH check documentation.

We’ve got fully-functional, open-source clients in Python2, PowerShell, and POSIX script available on our GitHub public repo that have been tested with the following OSes:

• CentOS 5 (Python2 and POSIX)
• CentOS 6 (Python2 and POSIX)
• CentOS 7 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Debian 9 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Devuan 2 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Fedora 28 (Python2 and POSIX)
• FreeBSD (Python2 and POSIX)
• OpenBSD 6.3 (Python2 and POSIX)
• OpenSUSE LEAP 15 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Raspbian STRETCH (Python2 and POSIX)
• Ubuntu 14.04 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Ubuntu 16.04 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Ubuntu 18.04 (Python2 and POSIX)
• Windows server 2012 (Python2 and powershell)
• Windows server 2016 (Python2 and powershell)

Download a client and follow the instructions in the client README.md file to set up your PUSH client.

An example of the default metrics sent from our POSIX client:

OS load: 1 minute, 5 minute, and 15 minute load stats
Memory free in MB
Disk space free in percentage by mount point.

There are also optional modules for Redis, Cassandra, ZFS, iptables, and more.

All our clients are built so you can add your own modules to push additional metrics – the ones you care about. The requirements for pushing metrics into our system are fairly simple, so you can write your own scripts in your preferred language. It just needs to output JSON data with numeric values. You can find the information you need to create your own client modules in our PUSH check documentation and take a look at existing modules for examples.

We encourage pull requests for new modules so if you build something you think others would find useful, please do share.

We’re working on new reports and dashboards to visualize metrics, making the new PUSH check even more useful, so keep an eye out here on the blog for those announcements.

If you aren’t using NodePing yet, you can sign up for a free, 15-day trial and test out our new PUSH checks yourself. We think you’ll love the new functionality along with our rock-solid monitoring and fast/accurate notifications.