Nov 23, 2022
Here are 5 reasons why you should use Monika
There’s no such thing as bug-free software. Even when we think that the software or a certain version of it has no bugs, we still need to monitor it after deployment.
In an ideal world, this would be easy. We could just check the website on a regular basis and make sure everything is working correctly. However, in reality, there are many more factors to consider before we can even start thinking about monitoring:
How do we know if our system is working correctly? For example, if we have a website that’s supposed to show all of our products, how do we know if it works correctly?
Who should be responsible for monitoring? As developers we’re usually busy building new features, so who else can be responsible for checking that they work properly?
How often should we check? If you have thousands of pages on your website then checking them once per week won’t really work well!
That’s why we created Monika, an open-source synthetic monitoring command-line application. Using Monika, we can add as many websites to monitor for several conditions such as service outages, slow services, or even wrong content.
Here are the 5 reasons why you should use Monika:
1. Wide selections of notification channels
We develop Monika to make sure that it can send incidents/recoveries alerts via various channels, not just by email or Slack.
Monika can send notifications through Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, DingTalk, and many more so you won’t have to worry that you have to install certain collaboration tools just to get alerts from Monika.
2. Monitor databases
Aside from monitoring your web applications, Monika can also monitor your databases, such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, and Redis.
That way, when an incident happened in your web applications, you can also check the databases in case the source of the incidents comes from the database instead of the web application.
3. Monitor expiring TLS certificates
Making your websites secure by installing an SSL certificate is easy and free in recent years thanks to LetsEncrypt. However, LetsEncrypt certificates only last for three months. And if you forgot to schedule automatic renewal by using cron or a similar tool, your website visitors will see the scary warning in their browsers.
With Monika, you can be notified when there are expiring TLS certificates so that your website won’t be inaccessible just because of bad SSL.
4. Data can be exported and visualized
Since Monika is a command-line application, you can only see a bunch of strings. But if you want to show off some data to your boss or coworkers, you can visualize data from Monika using Prometheus and Grafana. We have covered how to do that in our previous two-part articles:
5. Free and Open Source
Yes, Monika is completely free and open-source! laptop, in your own server, in your Raspberry Pi, or even Fly.io! You can also contribute to our repository in GitHub to report bugs or add new notification channels.
Recap for memory
- Wide selections of notification channels, roughly 15+ notification channels.
- Monitor not only web servers but also databases such as Redis, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL.
- Notify expiring TLS certificates, no more bad SSL.
- Data can be exported and visualized using Prometheus and Grafana.
- Free and Open Source.
Closing
If you’re having a problem with using Monika, don’t hesitate to create an issue on Monika’s Github Issue Page. If you like this article, don’t forget to clap and share this article with your friends!
That’s it for today, see you next time!
Hyperjump is an open-source-first company providing engineering excellence service. We aim to build and commercialize open-source tools to help companies streamline, simplify, and secure the most important aspects of their modern DevOps practices.
