PrettyGoodPing: Now With Even More Goodness

"Yoga Rave" by Tucker Sherman is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

PrettyGoodPing is a kind of lo-fi web monitoring service that I created so that I could get a basic overview of things that I cared about without needing to do complicated things. It started off as a little hobby project back in 2022. It has kind of been running mostly unattended in the meantime and I’ve been quite happy with the stability of it so I was reluctant to fix things that were not broken.

Yesterday I wrote about how I moved PrettyGoodPing’s hosting to the EU. While I was doing the “lift and shift” I realized I had an opportunity to address some of the pain points in the app that have long been on my mental TODO list. Today I’ll summarize some of the more useful changes I’ve made over the past few weeks.

#Domain / TLD monitoring

The number of supported TLDs for monitoring domain name expiration went from 97 to 1,160. So if you’ve got a massive portfolio of domain names or you really need to track the expiration of your .versicherung domain, I’ve got you covered.

#Slack notifications

Slack webhook support has landed. Since there is not (yet) an SMS integration, this is a cheap workaround to get alerts on your phone.

#Notification acknowledgement

Slack and email notifications now include an Ack(nowledge) link that allows you to silence further notifications about an outage.

#iCal subscriptions

Create an iCal calendar feed of domain registration and TLS/SSL cert expirations. This is a handy way of getting an overview of where your expirations are at.

#Multipart email

Emails are now multipart to make them render nicely in more scenarios.

#TLS / SSL checks

STARTTLS support for SMTP submission/relay port cert checks is here.

#Mobile & UI

The responsive design is now better. It’s not great, but it’s better. That is still a work in progress.

#Hosting / infrastructure

As I mentioned above, hosting has moved to the EU. Also data is now backed up to Backblaze B2 via Litestream. The production Docker image is now slimmer due to a multistage build and various security hardening measures are now in place.

PrettyGoodPing has saved me more than once when it comes to catching expirations in time and watching for uptime issues on projects I care about. Maybe it’ll be a pretty good tool in your toolbox as well.