Comments on: New Pingdom feature: Custom monitoring type

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:46:25 +0000

@Troy: If you have any questions on how to use this monitoring option, please don’t hesitate to contact our support (support AT pingdom DOT com). It is intended to give you a flexible interface to scripts on your side, so it does require you to be able to do some coding, though.

@Marco: Great idea to have a customizable “unit” for the returned value. We may very well add this down the line, though at the moment it’s “ms” since it integrates with our regular response time reports.

By: Marco van den Berg

Marco van den Berg — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:55:29 +0000

This is really cool. What would make it even cooler: make the variable definable, not just response time. How about something like this:

OK
CPU temperature
Degrees C
31.4

That way, error messages can be reported more meaningful than currently (it’s kinda weird to see CPU temperature expressed in ms!).

Marco

By: Troy

Troy — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:49:53 +0000

Sounds great, one problem though a drunken mute chimp could code stuff like this better than me.

Do you have any code examples? Especially one to output “Used RAM” values?

By: jardel

jardel — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:52:24 +0000

oh, it clarifies a lot! Now i loved the service, i understood that i just show “ok/ not ok” when i submitted the last comment

now the possibilities are infinite, you could track even non-website things like setup your webcamera to detect movimments and return “robbed / not robbed”

Or setup an check to check your bank account funds

nah, kidding on the last one.

thanks!

By: Pingdom

Pingdom — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:14:18 +0000

Hi Jardel,

You could indeed set up a check like the one you described. However, this new custom check type also allows you to return a custom value (which essentially replaces the response time data in Pingdom) in addition to the status.

The combination of status + a stored value is very useful, and you can examine it in our different reports (you can for example study how the value has changed in the response time report).

I hope that clarification helps.

By: jardel

jardel — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:47:14 +0000

that wasn’t possible before?
like:

* i settup my script to stamp in a page “ok”
* i go to pingdom and configure it to check for this webpage and check also if “check for string on page:”
* and select “it contains ok”

then pingdom will check if is ok/not ok just like what i understand in this post

i don’t know if is the same, but point me if it isn’t