Uptime & Infrastructure Monitoring

The problem with dumb monitoring alerts

UptimeRobot pings your URL every 5 minutes and emails you “Your site is DOWN.” That is the entire message. No context about what changed, no correlation with your latest deploy, no explanation of the error response. You Alt-Tab to your terminal and start investigating from scratch.

PagerDuty adds routing and escalation policies on top — useful for teams, but at $21–99 per user per month, it is overkill for solo developers and small teams. You are paying for on-call rotation when you are the only person on call.

AI agent monitoring is smarter

An AI agent paired with syncfu does what monitoring SaaS cannot: it understands context. Instead of “site down,” you get:

syncfu send -t "API /users returning 503" -p critical \
  -i server-crash -s uptime-monitor \
  -a "ack:Acknowledge:primary" \
  -a "rollback:Rollback deploy:danger" \
  -a "snooze:Snooze 15m:secondary" \
  "Down since 2 min ago. Last deploy: 10 min ago (commit abc123).
Likely cause: the new auth middleware.
Error: ConnectionPool exhausted (max_connections=25)"

The agent checked the endpoint, found the 503, looked at your git log, read the error response, and composed a notification with context and actionable buttons — all before you noticed anything was wrong.

SSL certificate expiry monitoring

A cron job that checks certificate expiry and alerts via syncfu when renewal is needed:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Check SSL expiry — run daily via cron
# 0 9 * * * /path/to/check-ssl.sh

DOMAIN="yourdomain.com"
EXPIRY=$(echo | openssl s_client -servername "$DOMAIN" \
  -connect "$DOMAIN:443" 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -enddate \
  | cut -d= -f2)
DAYS_LEFT=$(( ($(date -d "$EXPIRY" +%s) - $(date +%s)) / 86400 ))

if [ "$DAYS_LEFT" -lt 14 ]; then
  syncfu send -t "SSL Certificate Expiring" -p critical \
    -i shield-alert \
    -a "renew:Renew Now:primary" \
    -a "snooze:Snooze 1 day:secondary" \
    "$DOMAIN expires in $DAYS_LEFT days ($EXPIRY)"
fi

Disk space and resource alerts

# Disk space check — cron every hour
# 0 * * * * /path/to/check-disk.sh

USAGE=$(df -h / | awk 'NR==2{print $5}' | tr -d '%')
if [ "$USAGE" -gt 90 ]; then
  REMAINING=$(df -h / | awk 'NR==2{print $4}')
  syncfu send -t "Disk Space Warning" -p high \
    -i hard-drive -s disk-monitor \
    "/ is $USAGE% full — $REMAINING remaining"
fi

Multi-service health dashboard

Monitor multiple services with grouped notifications. Each service reports its status, and syncfu stacks them as a live dashboard on your desktop:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Health check dashboard — run every 60s
SERVICES=("api:https://api.example.com/health"
           "web:https://example.com"
           "db:https://api.example.com/db-check")

for entry in "${SERVICES[@]}"; do
  NAME="${entry%%:*}"
  URL="${entry#*:}"
  STATUS=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" --max-time 5 "$URL")

  if [ "$STATUS" != "200" ]; then
    syncfu send -t "$NAME is down" -p critical \
      -i server-crash --group health-dashboard \
      -a "ack:Acknowledge" -a "restart:Restart:danger" \
      "HTTP $STATUS from $URL"
  fi
done

What this replaces

Frequently asked questions

Related

• syncfu vs UptimeRobot — detailed feature comparison
• syncfu vs PagerDuty — when you need enterprise vs free
• Shell aliases — set up cron-based monitoring scripts