Why We Open-Sourced Our Uptime Monitoring System

About a month ago, Sourcegraph released Checkup, an open-source, self-hosted uptime monitoring system written by Matt Holt. Following its release, a lot of people asked us how we were using Checkup at Sourcegraph. Today, we’re sharing our public status page, powered by Checkup, and laying out some of the big advantages we’ve found using an open-source health check tool.

Why yet another uptime tool?

We sponsored the creation of Checkup, because we found none of the existing paid or free uptime monitors met our needs. You can read the Checkup launch post for details, but here’s a quick overview of some of the things it enables:

• Define checks in code instead of via GUI: A lot of other uptime services require you to define your health checks manually using slow, clunky interfaces.
• Keep health checks up-to-date: Before Checkup, we found that it was easy for our health checks to fall out of date, because they were stored outside our codebase.
• Useful for both public and private services: You can’t use SaaS uptime monitors for services that aren’t publicly accessible on the Internet.
• No black-box downtime: Uptime services themselves can sometimes go down and when the source and production environment are not available, it can be hard to understand why...