Binocs - CLI-first uptime monitoring tool

Our team has been operating internet infrastructures for over a decade. During this time we have used various tools for uptime monitoring. One of our observations was that false positives and false negatives reported by the popular products were quite common. We spent some time hacking on the available open-source solutions, keen to fix the issues. Our experiments with the existing solutions led us to think of potential innovations that could improve the accuracy of any synthetic uptime monitoring tool. We decided to put together an experimental solution that implemented the gossip protocol; a solution built on top of our experience with building and maintaining distributed systems and facing (too) many different issues over the years.

On top of this mega-redundant monitoring backend, we built a unique CLI interface:

Figure 1 – The output of $ binocs check ls

Binocs CLI facilitates the configuration of uptime checks and notifications, and the presentation of useful information about incidents and uptime/performance stats over time. The CLI tool is built around the Cobra library, which is used by tools such as Kubernetes and GitHub CLI. It makes the Binocs command-line interface approachable and well documented. We offer binaries for popular platforms and architectures on our Binocs Downloads page, and we release upgrades often! This is a young project and we are flexible and open to feedback from our users.

Binocs is a paid service with credit-based billing. We welcome new users with free credit packs. We use elastic billing and charge based on the number of requests we make on your behalf (and the number of notification SMS we send on your behalf, if you choose the SMS notifications channel for some of your checks). There is no monthly fee, and we don't limit features based on how much you spend on Binocs. So even if you just want to check one site, all powers of Binocs are available to you, in your command line, at your fingertips 🙂

Update: We just launched Binocs Terraform Provider!