observe.jabber.network

What is this?

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.

What problem does it solve?

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.

Table of Contents

  1. Features
  2. Criteria for participating
  3. Questions & Answers
  4. Contact

Features

Criteria for participating

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.

Questions & Answers

Why is this?

I’ve seen people needing such a service. I have the infrastructure to run it. So why not?

Okay, where is the catch?

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.

What do I need to do?

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.

This is great, where do I apply for monitoring?

  1. Check the feature list above and think about which checks you want for your domain.
  2. Make a list of domains you want to have monitored.
  3. Make a list of all further questions you have about the service.
  4. Pick an email address which will receive the monitoring alerts.
  5. Get in touch with me!

What, you’re serving a static HTML page using an asynchronous Python web framework. Do you hate the planet?

No. Wait for it. There’s more to come.

Contact

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.)

About this page

The software serving this page is xmppobserve-web, licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or later.