Using Synthetic Monitoring to Monitor External Services, URL Recommendations from ControlUp Members

Members discuss using synthetic monitoring to monitor external services such as Zoom, Telegram, Discord, and Slack. They mention the benefits of receiving alerts for service outages, and the need to determine reliable URLs for monitoring. Netify.ai’s list of applications with their corresponding URLs is suggested as a starting point. There is also a mention of possibly bundling apps to streamline the process.

Read the entire ‘Using Synthetic Monitoring to Monitor External Services, URL Recommendations from ControlUp Members’ thread below:

Good day

Anyone using synthetic monitoring to monitor external services?

Zoom , telegram , discord or even something like slack ?

I think that would be a great use case. Like for example the slack outage yesterday. It would have been great to get an alert from Scoutbees.

Exactly or WhatsApp that was off earlier today for a few min

@member for visibility

I have a bunch of services that I monitor on our tech marketing demo account. See for example slack this week (clearly showing the global outage that happened on Wednesday)

I think the main challenge or part that needs figuring out is "what URL" you should monitor to reliably determine downtime.

Example: if you want to monitor ControlUp DEX, monitoring app.controlup.com is not going to tell you the full story, since it’s just the web front end. When we have planned maintenance and/or downtime it’s often impacting other services, e.g. for US accounts it would be making calls to https://prod-dex-login-eastus.controlup.com

In summary: yes, you can totally do this. And for a couple of services we have built-in tests (e.g. exchange test tests a few services, see second screenshot, there is also a Teams test, which is mostly focused on VOIP services). But for others it would just require some research and then determine the best test. Most basic would just be the HTTP/S test but you can modify them to look for specific responses like 200 and determine your success/failure of the response

https://www.netify.ai/resources/applications could be a good starting point. They have URLs for many apps, e.g. https://www.netify.ai/resources/applications/whatsapp

Ehud, if anything we could look into how we can "bundle" apps so that you don’t have to create 10+ scouts for a test. At some point we had something on the roadmap for this, but not sure what our direction is for this

@member are those you created "get" requests ?

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