I'm a little concerned by the idea of running a system within cloud VPS
where the uptime is considered very important.

Also, why would it need to be a dedicated external IP address, what's wrong
with the proxy in this case?

I have been using gratitude.wmflabs.org for several months now and it works great, thanks so much!

I assume this actually means the 'gratitude' Cloud VPS project: https://tools.wmflabs.org/openstack-browser/project/gratitude

I want to run a "heartbeat" service from another server, that will be able to ping "gratitude.wmflabs.org" (or a static IP) to make sure it's running

I would like to avoid XY problems in this discussion, so could you please provide a bit more detail about what service you actually hope to monitor and why? A ping monitor would only confirm ICMP (or possibly UDP or TCP) reach-ability of the host which seems unlikely to actually be what you would want to measure.

Hi @bd808 . Fair enough point about the XY problem. The "Y" in this case is that I would like to know if the gratsync.gratitude.eqiad.wmflabs Cloud VPS instance goes down for a period of time (or for any reason is unable to execute it's crontab, which is being used as the job scheduler).

Thanks for you response.

In T237132#5632720, @Maximilianklein wrote:

The "Y" in this case is that I would like to know if the gratsync.gratitude.eqiad.wmflabs Cloud VPS instance goes down for a period of time (or for any reason is unable to execute it's crontab, which is being used as the job scheduler).

For monitoring instance availability, I think a better method than a public IP would be to add the gratitude project to the configuration for the shinken project. Shinken could then notify you via irc or email when instances are down.

It sounds like what you really want to monitor however is the last run time of one or more cron jobs inside the instance. One way to do that would be to have the cron tasks which are to be monitored write some "last run" status data locally and then expose that data external to the instance over http. Then some monitor of that would need to be created somewhere (inside of outside of Cloud VPS) which polled the http endpoint(s) and compared the last run time to current world time and alerted if outside of some configured tolerance. This again can be done without a public IP by setting up a web proxy that used the instance's http monitoring endpoint as its backend.

Hi @bd808 thanks for the response. We've considered your responses in a) using shinken, and b) writing "last run status". We feel it would be easier to go the route of setting up shinken to monitor the gratitude VPS. How can we go about getting shinken accounts?

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

In T237132#5637925, @Maximilianklein wrote:

Hi @bd808 thanks for the response. We've considered your responses in a) using shinken, and b) writing "last run status". We feel it would be easier to go the route of setting up shinken to monitor the gratitude VPS. How can we go about getting shinken accounts?

The best thing to do I think it create a new ticket to track that request. Tag it with Cloud-VPS and add me as a subscriber and I will figure out how to get it into the backlog for cloud-services-team or find someone else to help with implementation.

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

You are welcome. And thank you for helping us better understand your goals!