The latest articles on DEV Community by marksugar (@marksugar). https://dev.to/marksugar https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3732517%2Fa6cc2f94-7813-49af-a12f-a4052876e660.png https://dev.to/marksugar en marksugar Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:39:56 +0000 https://dev.to/marksugar/a-lightweight-non-intrusive-approach-to-website-monitoring-ops-perspective-36f4 https://dev.to/marksugar/a-lightweight-non-intrusive-approach-to-website-monitoring-ops-perspective-36f4 <p>I’m a Linux ops engineer working in the DevOps/SRE space. and over the past few months, I’ve been working on a small <strong>website monitoring</strong> side project in my spare time:<br> 👉 <a href="https://inostop.com/en/" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://inostop.com/en/</a></p> <p>Most of the monitoring and ops tools I’ve built before were used internally within companies. This is my first attempt to turn a relatively complete tool into something publicly usable.</p> <p>In day-to-day operations, website monitoring usually involves:</p> <ul> <li>Infrastructure monitoring</li> <li>Application / API monitoring</li> <li>Partial CDN monitoring</li> </ul> <p>These are often built on top of tools like Prometheus or Zabbix, combined with log systems (ELK / OpenObserve) and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).<br> While powerful, this stack can feel <strong>heavyweight and overkill</strong> when you just want to quickly monitor a website’s availability.</p> <p>That led me to experiment with a simpler approach:</p> <ul> <li>Non-intrusive (no code changes required/Sidecar)</li> <li>Out-of-band probing to estimate website availability</li> <li>Conservative thresholds to reduce false alarms</li> </ul> <p>So far, the project covers:</p> <ul> <li>Domain and TLS certificate monitoring, Ping, Telnet checks</li> <li>Basic alert thresholds and multi-stage alert silencing to reduce alert fatigue</li> </ul> <p>There are still open challenges:</p> <ul> <li><p>There’s still room to improve the UX of the Website Monitoring results (backend is written in Go).</p></li> <li><p>AI currently works only as an analysis layer on collected data, rather than actively performing real network probes</p></li> </ul> <p>This project is still evolving (I’ve rewritten parts of it more times than I’d like to admit 😅).</p> <p>If you’d like to try it out, there’s an early access code <strong>95f40841e4888668c4d5f7e88506075d</strong>, valid for 1 months, mainly for collecting early feedback.</p> <p>I’d love to hear feedback from the community:</p> <ul> <li>Does a lightweight, non-intrusive website monitoring approach make sense in practice?</li> <li>Are there better patterns or architectures worth exploring?</li> <li>If you’re a QA or test engineer, I’d love to hear your thoughts.</li> </ul> monitoring