Guidance around external monitoring

[petenorth]

The gov.uk service manual

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/monitoring-the-status-of-your-service

states that sites should have both internal and external monitoring.

External monitoring is the monitoring you should set up outside of your service which keeps checking your systems even if your infrastructure goes down.

Status pages have been implemented for existing services using ‘status as a service’ offerings, the most popular within DfE being

• https://www.statuscake.com/
• ???

[petenorth]

@himal-mandalia Looking at statuscake's price list it seems odd that status checking isn't something covered by a organisation wide subscription.

A single project that needs team support (mandatory?) could pay $12.49/month to check a single endpoint URL or the organisation could pay $41.66/month that would cover 300 service endpoints.

[himal-mandalia]

@petenorth added ticket on the dev meeting board:

https://trello.com/c/lciEUi3n/19-external-monitoring

We should discuss, reach a consensus and see about getting a subscription in place - it might just be for Teacher Services rather than department-wide but that's good enough for now.

[petenorth]

@himal-mandalia missed the last bi weekly meeting has this moved along at all?

[himal-mandalia]

@petenorth I missed it too - worth asking @misaka. Probably best in Slack#teacher-services-devs

[petenorth]

@himal-mandalia Am going down an Application Insights route. This gives us multi-region availability monitoring of a URL at a low price, so in theory if a region where our infrastructure/services are located goes down then we should get alerted.

It is a much cheaper option.

Also it can be created via a template so plays nicely with CI/CD .

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/monitor-web-app-availability#create-a-url-ping-test

[himal-mandalia]

@petenorth nice. Looks like the path of least resistance right now. I'll socialise via the developers Slack channel, then we should document this.