Using AWS Lambda to call and text you when your servers are down

From a engineering point of view this is really cool, but as an ex-sysadmin I feel that I need to reiterate and emphasize something that is alluded to in the second paragraph.<p>Too many things can go wrong and you are all around better off outsourcing this to something like Pingdom. You don&#x27;t have sufficient levels of reliability, you aren&#x27;t dual homed across twilio and another phone system. Maybe the cause of your outage is that AWS is having issues. Now your site and your monitoring is down.<p>Much better to outsource to people who obsess over doing this right and making sure they are properly redundant.

And I&#x27;m sure Lambda will never go down. Right? Right??<p>(It has. Completely and silently stopped processing against Kinesis queues for a few hours recently. Guess what AWS Step is built on?)

I wrote Apex Ping (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apex.sh&#x2F;ping&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apex.sh&#x2F;ping&#x2F;</a>) for those who want more features and&#x2F;or don&#x27;t want to waste the time to save a few bucks :D.

I wrote something similar in bash and put it into a docker image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;simplepush&#x2F;alerta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hub.docker.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;simplepush&#x2F;alerta</a><p>Just running this docker image on a server you want to monitor is enough.<p>Instead of Twilio it uses Simplepush (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simplepush.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simplepush.io</a>).

Isn&#x27;t the better plan to use Lambda <i>instead</i> of your servers?

I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aremysitesup.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aremysitesup.com&#x2F;</a> and I&#x27;ve found it really helpful as it one of the few inexpensive services I&#x27;ve found that will CALL me if things are down. SMS is nice, but I use the do-not-disturb feature on my phone in the evenings, and at least on iOS, the only way to punch through that is with a call from a number on my favorites list. This meets that need very well and I&#x27;ve found the service to be quite spot on alerting me (both when I had one instance of things hitting the fan, but also during scheduled maintenance). I&#x27;d highly recommend.

The advantage of this type of cloud solution over a one-size-fits-all cloud service like Pingdom (which I use) is flexibility. You can configure cloud agents to perform nearly any task you can envision.

I don&#x27;t know if everyone knows this but you can make texts using email.<p>Most providers have SMTP gateways for SMS services. Verizon runs @vtext.com

Note: instead of dynamodb for the lookup mentioned at the bottom, maybe consider <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;athena&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;athena&#x2F;</a> for an s3 query

Route53 Health Checks &amp; SNS can send sms message without any Lambda involved.

I&#x27;ve used montastic.com for years. 2min setup to fire and forget.