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Status Cake - opinions please
I'm still looking at monitoring packages, and since most offer a free trial/package, I've been trying out a few.
One of those is status cake, which seems quite nifty, has a lot of the nice graphing that I'll need and does all you can eat for a very reasonable price.
What I'm looking for is opinions on the service itself in terms of accuracy, and the speed and quality of support when needed.
Comments
I've had a few false downtimes since I've been using it (about a year ago), for personal use it's fine. For more serious business use, I'm not so sure - if you look up some recent threads support seems terrible. Daniel came on and mentioned he is changing staffing then a few posts later people were still having problems getting a reply for support.
False downtimes yes, and the free package on 5 minutes interval sometimes need up to 13Minutes to inform me that something vent down so for critical stuff noes.
I started using Status Cake a few days ago and already experienced a false 2 HOUR downtime...the same VPS/website is monitored with other services (like Uptime Robot and Pingom) and neither of those have that VPS listed as ever being down (especially not down for 2 hours) nor do any of my logs....not to mention I was working on the website during the time Status Cake listed it being down for 2 hours lol.
That pretty much puts a nail in it, poor support won't work.
my experience is that their alert email goes to the spam folder of my gmail
That's a fairly easily resolved issue.
Have had an account there for a quite a while. Never needed to use support though I am told the slow support replies was caused by a sudden rush of 25,000 signups in quite a short period of time.
Works good and the unlimited checks is a great plus
I have been using statuscake for a while. I receive far less false positives (read as, none) than any other service. I also have a paid plan. Emails are not what I'm there for, I prefer the SMS. I do not know how quick the email arrives. With a paid account I can check from 8 different locations and use the 1 minute interval check.
I'd wonder if those having issues are using the free service or on a paid tier. I've worked with their support on one occasion and that was due to a faulty firewall causing downtime to report incorrectly, on my side. After speaking with them and confirming this was the issue, they covered the SMS usage so it wouldn't affect my remaining SMS bucket.
How often are the monitoring nodes in available? I'm having a lot of issues at the moment with Gomez monitoring nodes in China dropping out, and would prefer not to have to keep pissing about with test set ups.
I need a trial account with them to see what you get per monitor, because according to their pricing they look to be more expensive than Gomez if you want enterprise-level testing.
I actually just want to know what one monitor gets you - is one monitor one test, or does a monitor equal one site with as many tests as your want?
That sucks then, the only pricing advantage they hold over Gomez is their less steep pricing tiers at the bottom end. Another one off the list :-/
Not to worry, at their prices there wouldn't be any point in moving away from Gomez.
@nekki
why dont you just save yourself some $$ and use uptimerobot? i've had zero false positives with it using the PING method and i've encountered no limitations yet. I also dont see why you would need support with those simple monitoring services.
Uptime Robot lacks most of the feature set I require, and I've had a number of issues with alerts taking far too long to be picked up - I've seen delays of around 30 minutes in the past notifying downtime; one of these was while I was demoing it to my boss, who will now obviously not touch them.
Support is key particularly if a monitoring node goes down, as I need good geographic coverage; for example, loosing a node in HK or China for longer than a few hours would be a serious issue, but generally speaking if we're left hanging about for days on end waiting for support.
Personally I haven't had a very good experience with them. I was double billed for 3 months(correction) and I have not been able to get ahold of support to cancel my credit card payments. As far as down alerts, I have noticed they are several minutes after they should come in. I only noticed this during our network maintenance. We use both NodePing and StatusCake. Nodeping alerted properly and StatusCake was about 7 minutes behind. So as of right now, I don't have much good to say about them. I do like their graphs and what not, but monitoring is hit or miss. Their support doesn't seem to exist from what I can see. (Correction, I did just try live chat, and they do seem to monitor that)
Those are both huge marks against them; 7 minutes delay is pretty deadly and the issue with support seems to come up a lot, which is concerning.
I never tried their live support as I figured it was just an e-mail. I just now contacted them and they resolved my billing issues. Personally I have been happy with NodePing. However I am also looking for a second reliable monitor.
@Mark_R, I wish I could concur about UptimeRobot.
I like UptimeRobot, a lot but every once in a while there is a hiccup. Like yesterday, when their whole site was showing "Maintenance Mode" for over an HOUR ... and when it came back, the monitors were "frozen" at the state they were in when it went down -- for 20 minutes more. Which then impacted webhooks to Rage4. I actually setup other monitors with other services to verify this.
It is making me research "rolling my own" again. Yeah, I know, why bother... but I want more control + aggressive (frequent) checking + more reliability + cost effective, so ............
Yeah I see what you mean, I shouldn't have made my previous post because I'm basicly not using uptimerobot for business purposes, it is just to keep an eye on my personal server with a 20 minute interval. if it goes down for more than 20 minutes then I'll start to worry. I'll do a better job at reading next time.
Similar experience, had our first unplanned downtime and StatusCake was pretty late, for some reason even monitors that were on VM's of the main node still took another 10-15 minutes to appear as down, and I'm sure the node itself took 10 minutes to appear to be down and send me push alerts and text messages. Most people I know that have NodePing are on their legacy pricing, honestly I think it's a little more expensive than it needs to be with current pricing.
Support says I had a 5 Minute trigger, I was 100% sure that I had it set to alert me immediately. So if you're interested to give them a try, make sure to triple check your settings. Monitoring for me is so I can respond as quickly as possible.
No worries, some would argue that you shouldn't use a FREE service for business purposes; and I get that. But when I look at what I get for the money with PAID services ... um, no thanks!
With colos and VPS's all over the place anyway and already self hosting a ton of stuff, why not?
Anway OP, didn't mean to derail, off to do more research on self-hosted monitoring solutions that kick @ ss :-)
carry on