Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Summarize with ChatGPT Claude To get alerted when a server goes down, run a check from outside the server and send its result to a channel that reaches a human. That check can be a cron script on a second machine that pings the host and tests a port, an external ping or TCP port monitor, or an agent on the server whose silence opens an incident. Email and Slack are fine for the record. For a server that matters at 3am, the alert has to escalate to SMS and then a phone call when nobody acknowledges it.

Summarize with ChatGPT Claude To monitor an Ubuntu server, watch seven things: CPU, load average, memory, disk space, disk I/O, network and whether the machine is up at all. You can check all of them in under a minute with commands that ship with Ubuntu (top, free, df, vmstat) plus iostat from the sysstat package. That is fine while you are logged in.

Summarize with ChatGPT Claude The Hyperping MCP server now has 49 tools: 28 that read and 21 that write. An agent connected from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or another MCP client could already manage monitors, publish a status page incident and schedule maintenance. It can now do most of the rest: declare an incident and page on-call, acknowledge and escalate it, correct what was posted on the status page, create and configure status pages, and reschedule, end or cancel maintenance.

Status pages now have a place for the last step of an incident: the post-mortem. Once an incident is resolved, you can write what happened, why it happened, and what you are changing, then publish it on the incident itself. Until now, the updates you posted during an outage ended with "Resolved", and the explanation lived somewhere else: a blog post, a PDF sent to a few customers, or an email thread. Customers who read the incident on your status page never saw it.

The best DNS monitoring tools are Hyperping for fast DNS checks with on-call and a status page, Oh Dear for authoritative nameserver comparison and change history, Site24x7 for DNSSEC and global locations inside a suite, UptimeRobot for inexpensive DNS checks next to HTTP, and DNS Spy for dedicated DNS security and WHOIS. I analyzed 24 current products and shortlisted five. Every tool below can query DNS on a schedule and alert when the answer is missing or wrong.

The best API monitoring tools are Hyperping for HTTP and API checks with on-call and status pages, Checkly for API monitoring as code, Postman Monitors for teams that already keep collections in Postman, Datadog for connecting failed checks to traces and logs, Grafana Cloud for teams using k6, Better Stack for checks inside a broader incident workflow, and UptimeRobot for inexpensive availability checks.

Summarize with ChatGPT Summarize with Claude The best Redis monitoring setup usually combines more than one tool. Use Prometheus with redis_exporter and Grafana for open-source metrics and alerts, Redis Insight when you need to inspect keys and slow commands, Datadog when Redis failures need to connect to application traces and logs, and Hyperping for the outside-in availability and incident-response layer. I analyzed 32 products and shortlisted seven.

Summarize with ChatGPT Summarize with Claude The best synthetic monitoring tools are Hyperping for Playwright browser checks with on-call and status pages, Checkly for Playwright-native monitoring as code, Datadog for connecting failed journeys to logs and traces, Grafana Cloud for teams using k6, Better Stack for checks inside a broader incident workflow, Site24x7 for no-code recording and broad location coverage, and Uptime.com for enterprise website monitoring.

An escalation protocol is the written rule set that says when an incident moves from the person holding it to the next level, who that next level is, how they get contacted and how long they have to respond. It sits underneath the escalation policy (the why) and above the contact matrix (the who), and it is the document the on-call engineer actually reads at 3 AM.

ICMP has no port number. It is an IP-layer protocol, number 1 in the IP header, that sits beside TCP and UDP rather than on top of them, so ping does not use a port and there is no "ping port" to open. When a firewall form asks for one, select the ICMP protocol and the echo request type instead. This post covers where ICMP sits in the stack, which types and codes you will actually meet, how to allow it through Linux, Windows and cloud firewalls, and when a ping check is the wrong check.