It's been a while since you've heard from us about Chill. Our last update was nearly two years ago. Phew! All of you in some point of time might have felt the urge to create something new only for the excitement to slowly fade away. We went through a similar situation ourselves. 😉
Here's the backstory, a few months back, we figured out that the tool we built was up and running in production for more than a year. It was still monitoring some of our production websites without any problems. We were not amazed as we would get downtime notifications from Chill on our Slack channels from time to time. This simple "ping tool" as some like to say, was performing very well without much supervision. That is why we decided to take it further by adding in new features and sticking with the minimal approach that we took when we started the project.
It's 2019, and here are some of the changes that we have made to "Chill" - our minimal and dependable service monitoring tool.
Stable Release
We quietly released our stable version of Chill v1.0.0 on Mar 12, 2019. Since the release, we have been making quite a few changes to Chill and its internals.
A New Logo
The very first change to Chill is our new logo. We always wanted Chill to have this sense of relaxation as it kept an eye on our services. The word "Chill" in Nepali translates to an Eagle, which is a perfect mascot for keeping good sight of our services. No wonder we have an eagle wearing cool shades as our logo. The mixture of both the Nepali and English meaning to Chill brings the logo to life. This is precisely how we got the name "Chill".
New Status Dashboard
We have revamped our status dashboard and included a few more items in there. First of all, we have included a new section called "Past Incidents" just below the status report. This section of the page includes any past events or downtime information of different services grouped by date. Similarly, the design of the whole page has been tweaked a bit to make it look minimal and clean.
Chill Status Dashboard
Support for HTTP Basic Authentication
Chill 1.1.0 adds support for HTTP Basic Authentication. In previous versions of Chill, your website/application would be marked as down if it was behind an HTTP Basic Authentication. Now, you just have to update your Chill configuration and provide your username and password for Chill to start monitoring your website behind an HTTP Basic Auth.
Support for Under Maintenance Status
Chill is now aware of websites under maintenance. If your website is under maintenance and is reporting an HTTP status of 503 with retryAfter header set to a value more than zero, Chill reports its status as Under Maintenance. This is particularly useful for web applications and services when they are on scheduled maintenance and don't want Chill to report downtime.
The integration of Under Maintenance status on the dashboard page is yet to come.
Service Retry Support
To make sure that the website is down, we now attempt to fetch the status of the website multiple times before throwing in a notification. This entirely removes any false alarms that we saw in previous versions of Chill. The time interval for service retry can be changed in Chill configuration as well. We have sane defaults in place for those who don't want to change the intervals.
Internal Changes
- All our packages and dependencies are in the most recent version.
- We have merged all our repositories to one single repository. This allows us to collaborate and make changes to Chill easily. Yes, installing Chill is still a pain, but we are soon going to make it easier than ever.
- Fixes to broken Websocket integration.
- Removal of Hipchat notifier. So long Hipchat! 👋
The Future
We are not done. We want to add more features to Chill while staying true to its core. We will continue to make steady changes to Chill in the coming months. Some exciting new additions that are coming to Chill are SSL Status Reporting and Slackbot Integration. In regards, we want to make sure that we write an update blog for every release. 😎
Stay up-to-date with our releases at https://github.com/leapfrogtechnology/chill/releases
Want to contribute to Chill? Want to send us feedback? Feel free to reach out at chill@lftechnology.com
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