Pingtere.st - social pinging - http://pingtere.st

Pingterest is the tool to track and ping the servers you love. The goal is to take a common question - is my server down? And make it fun. The idea is you can follow a set of servers, and others can see the servers you follow.

You can create a set of servers and monitor:

• DNS
• PING (ICMP)
• HTTP
• TCP
• UDP

Then, get alerts when servers go down or up via:

• Email
• Twitter
• Postcard (server must be down for more than 1 day, postcards will be sent by hand.)

Technologies Used

Overall our goal was to experiment with building a very stateful web app in Erlang, using techniques we often reserve for more web-based projects, while picking an application idea that is really a better fit for Erlang than Node.js, Python/Django, or Rails.

We used:

• gen_tcp for "pingers"
• erlydtl for templating
• Cowboy for HTTP
• Mysql

We created:

• A controller system that allows dynamic routing. a HTTP request enters Cowboy, and the static handler determines if a file exists. If it doesn't, the handler looks for a 'controller' (an erlang module with the naming convention of _controller. If that controller exists, the render method is called.
• A session state system that uses ETS and enables the API and web to track user sessions.
• Custom behaviors for 'pingers' that allow us to add additional pingers later.

Design Theme

We decided to use a (hopefully) "fair-use" parody logo which is a mix of "pingdom" and "pinterest". All design decisions were based off of Pinterest but we did the CSS by hand.

TODO: Future

• All servers are public; we'd like to make it so that you can see servers but people can't see some of your servers on your public page.
• Github and Travis-CI integration
• Pausing Servers
• Chat
• History is tracked for servers