[Nottingham-pm] Monitoring website uptimes

James Green jimbo.green at gmail.com
Tue Jul 29 10:35:55 PDT 2014


Hey folks,

Rather than my usual meeting-arranging blather on this list ... I have
an actual Perl-related question! OK, it's not very Perl related.

Following a bunch of recent conversations about the future of
search.cpan.org, and the fact it was seemingly down all the time, I've
started gathering stats on when both it, and metacpan.org, are
unreachable.

Unfortunately I'm getting a lot of what I suspect are false positives.
I'm using LWP::UserAgent to get() a specific search page from each
site, timing out after 30s, and if it hasn't loaded, considering it
"down" until the next check. This process runs every 2 minutes, from
cron. Quite often a site will fail to load just once, then be back up
the next time -- which is as likely to be a transient routing problem
at my end as an issue at theirs.

Does anyone have experience monitoring the availability of websites,
or exciting ideas for better approaches to this data?

The (only slightly icky) current collection code is at
https://github.com/jkg/cpan-uptime/ and you can see the way I
currently present it at http://cpan-uptime.dillig.af/, although I'm
trying not to publicise that too widely until there's more data, and I
have a better handle on presenting it...

All ideas welcome, on-list, off-list, or over beers on Thursday :-)

Cheers,

James


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