I’m working on lemmy-meter which is a simple observability solution for Lemmy end-users like me, to be able to check the health of a few endpoints of their favourite instance in a visually pleasing way.
👉 You can check out a screenshot of the pre-release landing page.
💡 Currently, lemmy-meter sends 33 HTTP GET requests per minute to a given instance.
For a few reasons, I don’t wish lemmy-meter to cause any unwanted extra load on Lemmy instances.
As such I’d like it be an opt-in solution, ie a given instance’s admin(s) should decide whether they want their instance to be included in lemmy-meter’s reports.
❓ Now, assuming I’ve got a list of instances to begin w/, what’s the best way to reach out to the admins wrt lemmy-meter?
PS: The idea occurred to me after a discussion RE momentary outages.
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Interesting, FYI there is a similar project: https://lestat.org/
Thanks for the link. Had no idea about that.
33 HTTP GET requests per minute to a given instance.
That is way beyond acceptable use, and would likely have your service blocked. There exists these services too :
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
Maybe those do what you’re trying to do?
There is not an “admin inbox” for lemmy instances. You can hit the endpoint
/api/v3/sitefor information about an instance including the admins list.beyond acceptable use
Since literally every aspect of lemmy-meter is configurable per instance, I’m not worried about that 😎 The admins can tell me what’s the frequency/number they’re comfortable w/ and I can reconfigure the solution.
You can hit the endpoint /api/v3/site for information about an instance including the admins list.
Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks very much 🙏
Are these 33 different requests or do you hit the same endpoint multiple times?
I’d probably default to every 5 minutes at most, but I guess if it’s up to the admin then it’s all good. 33 requests per minute shouldn’t be a ton of load if it’s all read requests.
Speaking as an admin of an instance here, 33 requests a minute is not “all good”.
Not without asking, but if the admin is okay with it then sure. I don’t see the point of any sort of monitoring making that many requests per minute though.
Indeed. IIUC, OP said 33 reqs/min is a ceiling and tunable on a per-target basis.
If the target is a Cloudflare instance, you could perhaps even do 300 reqs/min without even being noticed.
I’m not worried about that 😎
You should be. Your name will be associated with abuse forevermore.
The admins can tell me what’s the frequency/number they’re comfortable w/ and I can reconfigure the solution.
Or you can set some sane defaults and a timeout period. 1 request / 5 mins is fine to check if something is online and responding.
sane defaults and a timeout period
I agree. This makes more sense.
Your name will be associated with abuse forevermore.
I was going to ignore your reply as a 🧌 given it’s an opt-in service for HTTP monitoring. But then you had a good point on the next line!
Let’s use such important labels where they actually make sense 🙂
That is way beyond acceptable use
Each server would have its own acceptable use policy. Also consider the social detriment of Cloudflare nodes. We could even say @bahmanm@lemmy.ml has a moral /duty/ to overwork the Cloudflare nodes :)
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de: thanks for pointing out lestat. That’s one of the very few services of this kind to be responsible enough to red-flag the Cloudflare nodes. I hope @bahmanm@lemmy.ml follows that example; though it could still be improved on.
It’s misleading for any tor-blocking Cloudflare node to have a 100% availability stat just because by design it deliberately breaks availability to a number of users in an arbitrarily discriminatory fashion. https://lemmy-status.org/ and https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats do a bit of a disservice by not omitting or flagging #Cloudflare nodes.
Why does it need to make 33 requests per minute? Surely the data doesn’t have to be that up to date?
Agreed. It was a mix of too ambitious standards for up-to-date data and poor configuration on my side.
Update 1
Thanks all for your feedback 🙏 I think everybody made a valid point that the OOTB configuration of 33 requests/min was quite useless and we can do better than that.
I reconfigured timeouts and probes and tuned it down to 4 HTTP GET requests/minute out of the box - see the configuration for details.
🌐 A pre-release version is available at lemmy-meter.info.
For the moment, it only probes the test instances
I’d very much appreciate your further thoughts and feedback.
