Ask IH: Remote server / service monitoring for developers

Hi IndieHackers,

I just had a random thought about a server monitoring software which I built 3 years ago, but never got the chance to release it.

The application is written in Erlang, and it can monitor servers via ping, and can also check status of various other services like ssh, http, pop3, imap, smtp. It can essentially be extended to monitor any tcp/udp port.

At that time I was working in server management and web hosting industry, and could not complete the web UI part. I then moved on to create and release FileAgo, but now I am curious to know whether there will be any interest in a yet another server monitoring solution. This will be SaaS, to begin with, and can be offered on premises if the need arise.

My idea is to make it dead simple to add servers, just simply using curl to GET a url from the server which you want to monitor. For example, adding and monitoring http and ping on a server will be something like:

# curl https://my-saas.com/api/add_server
# curl https://my-saas.com/api/monitor/http
# curl https://my-saas.com/api/monitor/ping

.. and it is done. The user will receive notification if http service goes down, or if the server is unreachable.

So basically the user simply has to call same set of urls from any server he wants to monitor, and my SaaS app will begin monitoring it.

Coming to pricing, I can give a free plan where the user can add upto 5 servers and monitor http and ping on them at constant interval (say, 30 minutes). The paid plan will be $10/server yearly, and can monitor other services as well at a very small interval (1 minute) between checks.

Notifications will be sent by email for free plan, but in paid plan they could as well be sent to slack (or even zapier).

Tell me folks, does this sound silly? good? What about the pricing (yearly $10/server)? I do not intent to provide any dashboard with stats and graphs at the beginning (the focus is more on alerting the user as soon as events happen), but that will be added later on.