red cursor Crew
Team Members
- mutle
- snikerrr
- deboerk
What
The Neighborhood Watch watches over your Servers and notifies you if the site is down.
Where
- Entry URL:
http://neighborhoodwatch.r09.railsrumble.com- Info / Screencast URL:
- http://twitter.com/thehoodwatch
How
- Sinatra
- Nginx + Passenger
- CouchDB
- couchrest
- RabbitMQ
- bunny
- sinatra-mailer
- ambethia-smtp-tls
- rack-openid
- ruby-openid
- BlueCloth
- cucumber
- rspec
- rack-test
- Webrat
- json
- jQuery
- reset.css from Yahoo
Comments
I like the idea. It’s helpful. Nothing ground-breaking. It took a bit too long to start monitoring my website though. I’d also like more of an explanation of what the website does on the dashboard so I understood how to use it better.
@clr,
Unfortunately the twitter feedback was one of the features we had to cut in order to finish on time.
We use CouchDB as our main data store, and use custom views in some places, for example to filter for sites that need a re-check. These sites are pushed into different queues (based on their priority) in RabbitMQ. So far the performance of both is quite good, and we’re not using any of the clustering/replication features yet, but hopefully these two products will help us scale our infrastructure when needed.
The agent instructions should work on most Linux distros, as well as OS X. We justed mentioned Ubuntu (“sudo apt-get install cron”) specifically, as it is the only distro I know that doesn’t ship with cron or the crontab command. Along the road we plan to release a compiled JRuby version for people without Ruby.
I like the concept, and I think there is still room in the market for site monitoring tools. I have hesitations about the agents all reporting to NEIGHBORHOODWAT.CH, which makes that domain a single point of failure. I tried it with a site of mine, and didn’t get any feedback either through the site or via email, and I didn’t see anywhere to add the twitter account for feedback.
I’m curious to know where you use CouchDB and RabbitMQ. It would be interesting to see whether these help you scale if you have a swarm of agents out there reporting status.
The agent installation instructions would have to be fleshed out for non-Ubuntu users if you take this to a wider deployment audience.
Great job!
The brand is a rip from NeighbourhoodWatch.net.