Monitoring results now available in JSON and CSV formats

Many of our customers monitor their own customers’ websites, or they monitor services about which they have to periodically report availability and incident statistics. Many of them would like to include status information in their own dash boards or integrate results with other data in reports. All of that calls for the data to be available in formats that can be easily used by scripts, or easily imported into spreadsheets.

NodePing has now added the ability to retrieve monitoring results in JSON and CSV format. JSON is ideal for scripting situations, such as creating your own dashboards or views of the data. CSV is great for loading the results data into your spreadsheets for analysis or creating reports for customers or management.

Both of these formats are available as extensions to our public reporting feature, which we added a while back. When you turn on public reporting, you are given a UUID that identifies that check. The same UUID can be used to access the data as a public report (you need to know the UUID, which gives you some control over who sees it, but does not require a login), as JSON output, or as a CSV download.

You can read more about these features and see some sample URLs on our Reporting page in the NodePing Documentation.

Contact Groups added to NodePing

We have been getting a lot of great feedback and suggestions from our users over the months since we launched the NodePing monitoring service. One feature that many people have asked for is the ability to group contacts and assign notifications to groups of contacts rather than just to individuals. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve added Contact Groups to the service.

You can now create a Group, assign individual addresses or phone numbers to each contact group, and then set the Group to receive notifications for individual checks. So, for example, you could create a Developers group and a Systems group and have each assigned to different sites or servers you are monitoring. Then if the makeup of that part of your team changes you can change who belongs to the group without having to change each of the notifications.

One way we use this feature in the NodePing team is to assign SMS numbers to a group called SMS. Then we can easily set notifications to all of our phones together. For us, SMS notifications generally mean “Do something about this now!” and it makes it easy to assign key services to this notifications contact group. You could also use it to group all of a person’s contact methods easily for notifications that should get to them wherever they are. So for example you could create a “Shawn” group and include all of Shawn’s email addresses and phone numbers in that group. Then notifications will automatically be sent to all of his addresses.

As with contacts, there is no limit on the number of contact groups you can use in NodePing. You can mix and match contact methods in all kinds of ways, to suit your particular needs. We’re happy to now get to use this feature ourselves, and we hope it will further enhance the usefulness of our service to you as well.

There are a few smaller enhancements and adjustments in the release today as well, and we have more coming. Thank you to everybody who has chosen NodePing for their server and website monitoring. Thank you also to everybody who has given us feedback and suggestions. Please keep them coming!