Is someone using the Cloud Monitoring module?

[nibb]

I need to know a bit more about it. What is it? A modified Nagios plugin? Or custom made script by Hostbill? Does it use PHP or the Linux OS?

I had something like this custom made for my older billing system, the first guy did a terrible job in PHP for 200$ and it was a ripp off, I had to hire someone else to complete with for antoher 150$ and then 50$ to add some features after it. It worked for my modest requirements.

Since PHP does not support multi threading, it was slow on 1000 checks taking 2 or 3 minutes to complete. My requirements are to check live domains, not just a ping but actually if its responding to http headers. From the hostbill page it says it can check http, but checking the port 80 means nothing as opposed to check if a domain or url is loading or not.

Does the hostbill module work? Does it check http or ping, or what type of checks does it? What type of settings, timeout, etc, can you set? Also, I need to know the performance, or in what its coded, and how does the distributed setup work in several servers?

There is nothing on the hostbill website about what exactly it does, except that you can integrate it to hostbill and if your servers runs out of juice you can add another monitoring servers.

I would ask this to them, except that now they even removed the ticket options for the license option. So now its completely impossible to ask them anything, even when it means money for a new purchase....

So I hope someone that used this or owns this can bring a bit more light.

[Danny]

I had this a time long in use. You get a tutorial how to install. You must take a Server with CentOS 6 than you have to do the instruction from HB. This downlods some packages from the HB Servers and installs all what is needed. After this you have to create API access in HB and you must add this data in a file on the CentOS 6 monitoring Server so that the server can connect to your HB via the API.

You have online http and ping check. There is no option for port check.

As i have buyed this there where many bugs of things (no notification via email or sms and more) what has never worked after some texting with them they fixed some of the bugs. So after this email notification has worked but the most importend thing here "SMS" notification has never worked for me.

Also the monitoring has detected downtimes that was never there. The rest was okay good looking Graphs etc. But the main thing, SMS notification has never worked for me.

[nibb]

Yea, well I don´t need port, just http check but I wonder how they do this.

Some basic monitoring scripts call "http" check but all they do is check the port.

For example,

If your domain is
example.com

They check:
example.com:80

This does not check the domain working, just the apache port.

Now, if its a real http check it will actually pull the url, but this is very intensive in most monitoring systems, so usually one fast way is just to check if the headers respond.

The false check was a problem with my PHP script as well. It was the main issue which had to be fixed several times and finally false checks where down. Since the Hostbill setup is distributed I would assume it would be clever enough to confirm a down if 2 checks fails, this is what I did.

If it failed once, because of servers load on the monitoring script or others, it would retry that check again. Now if you have 2 monitoring servers, the correct way is if to mark a downtime if both fail.

I don´t expect this to be very advanced, http check and ping is fine but I expected it to work properly because it does not really mater how man fancy features it has if its giving false checks you cannot use a module like this. There is nothing worst than sending your customers an alert their domain is down when its not. You will lose trust and he will just not use your service anymore.

So I´m sad to hear the module is giving you false checks. It seems its not very mature then yet.

How about load? How much load does it generate in your CentOS box when its doing the checks at what interval and for how many checks are you doing it?

I don´t think Hostbill created a CentOS monitoring packages by himself, it must be using something as the core, I would be interested to know what exactly, if its using something proven to be good for checks, then I assume the bugs are just in the way its interpreting the results. Hell, maybe its just using wget or some simple command.

I appreciate your feedback on this Danny, as I´m interested on this module. If more people use it of course more will report bugs as well. From the graphs in the hostbill page is also shows respond time (latency), it does not show that in the plugin page directly but it shows in the new design of the hostbill page. Is this correct? Does it also show response time for the checks in milliseconds?

You also say there are not settings in terms of timeout or anything at all, is this correct? So basically it just to check domain names and hostnames correct?

[FullDISK]

Someone is using it?
Work fine or?

I'm thinking of buying this module, but it is so expensive, I need to know if it works well..
Also, work like Nagios directly from the product? or need create a order page only for this?

My idea is provide to our clients, monitoring for dedicated servers... will this module show on the details of a service (dedicated server)?

Thanks
regards