How to monitor your web service using Statping

3 min readMar 9, 2021

Often times we need a certain response to find out whether the server is running well or is experiencing downtime. Many monitoring tools can be integrated with a variety of services today. Some are paid or free. In this article, I want to share one of the lightweight and fast open-source tools. The tool is called Statping. Statping can be integrated with various platforms such as Slack, Email, Mattermost, Twilio, and others. Statping can be used on various operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Let’s get started!

Prerequisites

You’ll need the following installed on your system:
- Docker
- Docker compose
- DNS

Installing Docker

$ curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
$ sudo sh get-docker.sh

If you would like to use Docker as a non-root user, you should now consider adding your user to the “docker” group with something like:

$ sudo usermod -aG docker <your-user>

Remember to log out and back in for this to take effect 😄

Installing Docker Compose

$ sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.28.5/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Apply executable permissions to the binary

$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

Create a symbolic link to /usr/bin

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose

Test the installation

$ docker-compose version 
docker-compose version 1.28.0, build d02a7b1a
docker-py version: 4.4.1
CPython version: 3.9.0
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.1.1d 10 Sep 2019

Installing statping

Create a docker-compose file with the following configurations:

version: '2.3'services:nginx:
    container_name: nginx
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - 0.0.0.0:80:80
      - 0.0.0.0:443:443
    labels:
      - "com.github.jrcs.letsencrypt_nginx_proxy_companion.nginx_proxy"
    networks:
      - internet
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
      - ./statup/nginx/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:ro
      - ./statup/nginx/vhost:/etc/nginx/vhost.d
      - ./statup/nginx/html:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro
      - ./statup/nginx/dhparam:/etc/nginx/dhparam
    environment:
      DEFAULT_HOST: ${LETSENCRYPT_HOST}letsencrypt:
    container_name: letsencrypt
    image: jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion
    networks:
      - internet
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - ./statup/nginx/certs:/etc/nginx/certs
      - ./statup/nginx/vhost:/etc/nginx/vhost.d
      - ./statup/nginx/html:/usr/share/nginx/html
      - ./statup/nginx/dhparam:/etc/nginx/dhparamstatup:
    container_name: statup
    image: statping/statping:latest
    restart: always
    networks:
      - internet
      - database
    depends_on:
      - postgres
    volumes:
      - ./statup/app:/app
    environment:
      VIRTUAL_HOST: ${LETSENCRYPT_HOST}
      VIRTUAL_PORT: 8080
      LETSENCRYPT_HOST: ${LETSENCRYPT_HOST}
      LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL: ${LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL}
      DB_CONN: postgres
      DB_HOST: postgres
      DB_USER: <username_for_db>
      DB_PASS: <password_for_db>
      DB_DATABASE: <db_name>
      NAME: Statping with SSL
      DESCRIPTION: This Status Status Page should be running with SSL.postgres:
    container_name: postgres
    image: postgres:10
    restart: always
    networks:
      - database
    volumes:
      - ./statup/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: <password_for_db>
      POSTGRES_USER: <username_for_db>
      POSTGRES_DB: <db_name>networks:
  internet:
    driver: bridge
  database:
    driver: bridge

The file will run Nginx proxy, statping, and automatic SSL using Let’s Encrypt.

Run docker-compose :

$ docker-compose up -d

Then, access the configured statping domain. The statping domain should have SSL installed. The statping dashboard display will appear as shown below.