Application monitoring with Pingdom

Pingdom is a website-monitoring tool that has the USP of notifying you as soon as your website goes down. The basic idea behind this tool is to constantly ping the website at a specific interval, say, 30 seconds. If a ping fails, it will notify you via an e-mail, SMS, tweet, or push notifications to mobile apps, which inform that your site is down. It will keep on pinging at a faster rate until the site is back up again. There are other monitoring features too, but we will limit ourselves to uptime checks in this book.

Getting ready

As Pingdom is a SaaS service, the first step will be to sign up for an account. Pingdom offers a free trial of 1 month in case you just want to try it out. The website for the service is https://www.pingdom.com.

We will use the application deployed to AWS in the Deploying with AWS Elastic Beanstalk recipe to check for uptime. Here, Pingdom will send an e-mail in case the application goes down and will send an e-mail again when...