Monitor your application status

Knowing if your application or web site is up and running correctly is crucial for your customers to have a good experience.

This solution, in its complete form, utilizes three open-source applications. Of course, you can start with just one and then add the other tools as you go.

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma monitors your web site or application at regular intervals. If a correct response is not received, Uptime Kuma can take various actions.

What are these actions?

• Errors are shown on your Uptime Kuma status page.
• Notifications can be sent to message services such as Matrix, Telegram, and Slack.
• You can create webhooks to trigger arbitrary events on other services.

This last capability allows for powerful automations when combined with other applications.

Node-RED

The above-mentioned webhooks can be routed wherever you want, but if you send them to Node-RED, you can create powerful and flexible workflows.

Node-RED is what we call a “glue service”.

What does that mean? It means it can connect multiple services together to automate the various processes that comprise your workflow.

Let’s see what that means in this case.

Let’s say that your web site’s landing page is not loading. Uptime Kuma notices this and uses a webhook to send details of what’s happening to Node-RED. At that point, Node-RED receives these details and can take appropriate action.

For example, you can check whether this is a known issue by asking another service if the problem has already occurred recently. If it is a new error, we can ask Node-RED to create an issue on the bug tracker that our developers use. By adding other conditions and triggers, you can create many other kinds of workflows.

One of these alternative flows is related to the third tool in this round-up.

NocoDB

NocoDB is an alternative to Airtable, which is a spreadsheet that allows you to do very advanced things.

Imagine NocoDB as a database that can store data and act upon it, even in complex ways, but without you having to write a single line of code.

As we learned above, Node-RED can transmit data to and from other services. In this case, we can send the site loading error details from Node-RED to NocoDB.

This can be handy because NocoDB is a more understandable and usable platform for less-technical people such as project managers. Perhaps they want to count how many bugs have occurred in a month. Maybe they want to search for certain keywords in the error output. If they want to use this data to create a report at the end of every month, they can do it all by themselves.

Adding It All Up

What did we get by combining all these tools?

• We know our site is having reliability problems.
• We can communicate this problem to our developers without a flood of redundant notifications.
• Even less-technical people can access this data and interact with it.

We have increased site reliability, informed all the people working on the project, and increased customer happiness. And we did it all completely automatically.

With this combination of tools, you will know that a problem needs fixing before your customers even notice it.

Fortressa provides you with all three of these tools. Usually you would have to create accounts at multiple service providers in order to get this combination, but with Fortressa you can get this combination and many others — all from the same place.

Contact us or enter your email below to get this very useful combination of tools.