observe.jabber.network is a free Monitoring-as-a-Service platform for operators of federated XMPP services. We offer multiple different types of checks against your XMPP service and real-time email notifications about problems.
Note: This is to be considered a public beta. Do not solely rely on this service for critical applications; you may use it in addition to your additional monitoring or for non-critical services. We can provide no guarantee about the availability of the monitoring, although we do our best.
When the XMPP service you are running goes down in a way your existing monitoring (if any) can not detect, it is helpful to have "a second pair of eyes" to watch it.
observe.jabber.network allows you to monitor your XMPP service from a distance. This includes:
That way, it can detect issues your own monitoring can not detect simply because we’re looking from a different place and with different software.
Multiple check types available:
Plus: Built-in certificate expiry checks!
Geo- and AS-Redundant monitoring: The monitoring stack is replicated between different data centers in Finland and Austria. This makes the checks more reliable, as an outage at one hoster will not cause unnecessary alerts. You will still only receive one alert if something breaks.
Completely managed software: You do not need to install anything. You don’t need to configure anything. You just need to be able to receive emails. We take care of the rest.
Industry-standard Monitoring Stack: Prometheus & Alertmanager, using the XMPP Blackbox Exporter.
Email-based alerting: All alerts concerning your domain(s) end up in your inbox. Other options may be offered in the future.
Free as in Freedom: All software components used, including this web frontend, are free and libre software. (The configuration management is currently not, and will most likely never be; this is because it is too tightly integrated in the entire other stack of services.)
Free as in Beverages: This service is offered free of charge to all operators of federated XMPP servers, no matter the size.
We offer this service free-of-charge to improve the XMPP Instant Messaging network. To use the benefits of this service, your domain needs to fulfill all of the following criteria:
Yes. That’s it.
Most notably, it is not required to be free of charge, offer public registrations, or have more than X users. No fancy limits here.
I’ve seen people needing such a service. I have the infrastructure to run it. So why not?
There is none. Well, okay, there might be one in the future: I run this in my free time. I run this on hardware and software which I operate in a semi-professional manner anyways. So if this goes beyond the capacities of the existing hard-/software stack, I may close registrations.
In addition, only servers which federate with other XMPP servers qualify. This is an arbitrary restriction, maybe, but I don’t want to support closed silos. Those will be commercial deployments in many cases and they should have their own ressources to do this.
Other than that, as mentioned, there is no catch. I run this stack anyways; adding a few more recipients and targets is no big deal.
Nearly nothing. You don’t need to run any additional software. You only need to have a working XMPP domain you want to monitor, plus an email inbox where you want to receive the problem alert emails. Everything else is handled by us.
No. Wait for it. There’s more to come.
This service is brought to you by Jonas Schäfer.
To apply for monitoring, submit feedback, donate a ping account or any other matters, contact me:
Use of OMEMO: I do not use OMEMO. Please do not try to contact me with OMEMO enabled. Not all of my clients support it, and it would be a shame if I lost your contact request. For encrypted requests, please use my GPG key and send me an encrypted email.
Add me to your contact list: As an anti-spam measure, you will have to add me to your contact list if you contact me via XMPP. Please send a short message alongside your request which mentions this service so that I know where you’re coming from. (If you already know me by a different XMPP address and have me in your roster, just contact me via that one.)
The software serving this page is xmppobserve-web, licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later.