Add external monitoring with uptimerobot

[mroderick]

We got lucky on Saturday, 2025-08-23 during the outage, where @jonodrew noticed that the site was down after a deployment.

We might not always be so lucky.

I propose that we add some (free) external monitoring of availability, so we will get notified when the site is unavailable next time.

Can we create a mailing list (or similar) for the web maintenance group, so we can all get a notification when the site is unavailable?

I have been using https://uptimerobot.com for a hobby project for years. The free plan works well enough for that. @till might know of better solutions out there.

[jonodrew]

A mailing list seems sensible. I think we can do a google group with ease. I think we can also set up alerts directly through Heroku, eg in https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/codebar-production/metrics/web?ending=0-hours-ago&starting=24-hours-ago

[mroderick]

Let's start with Heroku's built-in solution! I wasn't aware that this existed ... shall we add it in tomorrow's session?

[matyikriszta]

We do have uptimerobot and it did report the incident to us. I was just asleep during the whole incident :) We get a notification on a trustees only slack channel. I think Despo also gets text messages, I used to get these as well but haven't received them in a while now that I think of it 🤔 I can look into setting it up so it's going to a maintainers only mailing list.

[jonodrew]

Could we add the notification to the working group slack channel?

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On 25 August 2025 19:20:24 BST, Kriszta Matyi ***@***.***> wrote: We do have uptimerobot and it did report the incident to us. I was just asleep during the whole incident :) We get a notification on a trustees only slack channel. I think Despo also gets text messages, I used to get these as well but haven't received them in a while now that I think of it 🤔 I can look into setting it up so it's going to a maintainers only mailing list. -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #2309 (comment) You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Message ID: ***@***.***>