Visual Uptime MOnitoring

JohnB

I was hoping to get some feedback on this. I have been playing with a test script of mine that is similiar to these: https://alfredwang0707.medium.com/using-puppeteer-and-pixelmatch-to-monitor-websites-3cff77b2957b
https://github.com/romankh3/image-comparison

Basically the idea is take screenshots every x minutes and if there are major changes trigger an alert. Small changes (ie post added to blog page) get used as new baseline.

A lot of companies use something like this internally for QA testing but I've never seen a public service that offers this for website monitoring. At best they offer checking for specific keywords or lack of keywords.

Any feedback on this idea for general website monitoring or thoughts on why it doesn't exist?

Such monitoring would handle these cases:

Caching plugin & updates broke something. HTML content is normal but CSS issues lead to a broken site.
JS that populates a page failed
Missing image asset from page
Customer changes some CSS code / setting that has a bad affect on other pages.

ss88us

In Enhance? Overkill. That's just me though.

If your website is mission critical, a great idea.

Is this something similar? https://visualping.io/

xyzulu

ss88us
Thanks a neat service

JohnB

ss88us Is this something similar? https://visualping.io/

Yes it is very similiar to what I had in mind, thanks!

JohnB

ss88us In Enhance? Overkill. That's just me though.

As I don't sell hosting to random people but only host sites I build I'm curious about this perspective. Are you saying the average hosting customer won't pay for it or they just don't care?

I mean people host on godaddy so I guess they don't care...

I've had a lot of work that amounts to a customer did something a week ago and broke something different and just now noticed and they want it fixed NOW ITS THE END OF THE WORLD. But I guess it could be tricky offering a hosting extra that amounts to "when you f up your site because you should hire a professional, we will notify you!"

ss88us

JohnB I was just thinking if it was a feature inside of Enhance, then it would be overkill in my opinion.

I can see the need for this type of product, but not for the average customer. If your customer has a mission critical product then this product will certainly help them minimize loss of revenue.

About 15 years ago we offered uptime monitoring for free. Before we offered it, customers didn't care their website was offline for 10 minutes for upgrades (probably because they didn't know as we didn't get support emails). Once we added it, we were flooded with emails (despite network upgrade emails being sent out). Lesson learned. Customers really do not pay attention.

xyzulu

ss88us Customers really do not pay attention.

That is so true.. for at least 99% of customers.

We do random sites monitoring across servers internally so we can easily determine if it's a single site issue or a server wide issue.. but we don't provider customers access. We use a locally hosted (in our office) Uptime Kuma instance to monitoring our resources.

ss88us

xyzulu I actually use a third party called Better Uptime for mine, only because they have geographical locations that check the servers. I've been around so long that I've managed to see a few geographical routers go offline. It's not always your server, ha!

slimx

ss88us man i had this problem with a few Russian clients when the war started and a bunch of stuff was getting banned between countries fml lol - I use better uptime too they're great.

ss88us

slimx Exactly! If Asia and Europe say it's online but it's offline in America -- it's America's fault, haha

JohnB

Usually when I get downtime alerts with Uptime Kuma its because my POS vps that I use for monitoring needs its monthly reboot. I know to ignore it when it says 8.8.8.8 is down lol.

Used Freshping for a while and literally every downtime alert was because of their garbage servers. At least with uptime kuma I can control the server and config.