PUSH Client Wizard

2019/06/07 by Leave a comment

Last year, we introduced a new feature called PUSH Checks. This check type allows your server to push numeric metrics into our system, track the metrics, send a heartbeat, and receive alerts based on the results. This is a powerful tool, and we use it internally at NodePing to monitor system load, backup processes, gather metrics from logs, and a variety of other things. We’re also glad to hear about customers using this feature in interesting ways as well.

However, until now setting up a PUSH check could be challenging. You would have to create the check, download a copy of the client and configure it with the Check ID and Checktoken as well as configure the metrics. So today we’re releasing a PUSH Client Wizard (available on GitHub) that makes PUSH Checks really easy to configure and deploy across your systems using an interactive command line wizard. This Python 3 client is able to run on any system with Python 3.5 or newer, and has been tested on Linux, Windows 10, and FreeBSD.

Features

So what can it do? The wizard lets you list your existing PUSH checks, create new PUSH checks, and delete PUSH checks you no longer want.

When listing checks, it will show information such as:

  • Your check’s label
  • ID
  • Checktoken
  • If the check will fail when its results are old
  • PASS/FAIL status
  • If it’s enabled/disabled
  • Run Interval

When creating a check you can configure all sorts of information for the check such as:

  • The client you will use (POSIX, Python, Python3, PowerShell)
  • Information about the check (Label, interval, enabled, public reports, fail when old)
  • Metrics to gather for the check (or none for basic heartbeat functionality) and values for pass/fail
  • Contacts and their notification schedules
  • Client configuration
  • Remote/local deployment

Configuring the client is an optional step if you want to do it yourself. When configuring the client, you have the ability to deploy the new PUSH check client locally or remotely over SSH! Once the client has been configured, a cron job or Windows Task Scheduler event information will be provided so you can simply copy/paste the provided information at the end.

This tool will allow you to quickly and easily manage your PUSH checks so you can monitor your systems with PUSH checks in less time.

Give the wizard a try today!

We encourage pull requests for new features so if you make changes you think others would find useful, please do share.

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 and give the new wizard a try.

Filed under Announcement, PUSH, SysAdmin Tagged with , ,

PUSH Checks – Heartbeats and Metrics Monitoring

2018/08/27 by Leave a comment

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.

Filed under Announcement, NodePing Updates, PUSH Tagged with , ,