Tag Archives: Google

Freely Monitoring your Servers with Google Chat App Notifications

Monitoring:

Monitoring is considered one of the most important process in today’s world of Technology. Most Datacenters have their private monitoring systems with automation tools that would trigger failover, or Disaster Recovery in case of downtime being noticed and this is extremely costly operation.

What to Monitor?

CPU Usage, Memory Consumption, I/O, Network, Disk Usage, Process etc. Server Monitoring also helps in capacity planning by understanding the server’s system resource usage.

Other services can be monitored like Web Servers, FTP, Mail Servers or anything else if it’s publicly accessible.

Using UPTimeRobot Monitoring

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Uptime Robot Monitoring is a free-commercial service that has rich monitoring features where you can monitor your services/servers on 1 minute interval and get alerted by Email, SMS, Phone Apps e.g. (Telegram, Google Chat, or Skype).

The Free version

In the free version Monitoring you can add services based on ports and protocols or Servers. This might look limited to some but since it’s free of charge it can be very useful for small or startup companies with couple of servers.

– Limited up to 50 Monitors.

– No SMS.

– Check interval is 5 mins.

– Logs are not kept

The Commercial Version:

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In the commercial version you pay a small fee of 4.5$ a month, an you’d get the following:

– Up to 50 Monitors.

– 20 SMS.

– Check interval is 1 mins.

– Logs are kept for 2 years.

Adding a Server to Monitor:

After you create an account on UpTimeRobot.com you can easy add a site or a service to monitor right away and the monitoring will initiate after 5 minutes then it’ll report if the service,server you added is up or down.

Click on + Add New Monitor

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Next add the website, In my case i’ll add my own website and see how it works and then choose Google Chat (Since I already have the integration on).

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Once ready, click on create monitor

That should add the website directly into the List of monitored services:

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If you click on the Monitor, you’ll get the stat figure of how long has your website been on/off

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After waiting roughly 35 mins, I can see now that my website is up and running without any problem. The monitoring probe counts by milliseconds so you’ll be able to see if there’s any interruption in the connection to your website/server.

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Integration with Google Chat

Requirements:

  • Google Suit.
  • Google Admin Account
  • Create a Google Chat Room
  • Configure WebHooks

The integration between Google chat and UpTimeRobot requires Google G Suits account

I will login to my G account with admin user

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Next go to Chat admin console

Login with your admin account to google admin Console and then go to this link

https://chat.google.com/u/1/

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Create a room, Call it UpTimeRobot

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Once Created, Click on the … dots next to Now

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Now Configure WebHooks

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Call this UpTimeRobotContact and save

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This should create a URL for you, Something that looks like this! This

https://chat.googleapis.com/v1/spaces/AAAAcUvSsqs/messages?key=AIzaSyDdI0hCZtE6vySjMm-WEfRq3CPzqKqqsHI&token=qSlBYydgUj2mqqC8o_DIDY_RqcMaiI%3D

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Adding Members (To get notifications)

On the right side Add People and Bots

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Add a user to receive notifications once any server or service is down.

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Once you add a user, you’ll notice that the admin user’s notification below saying he/she added a user to the Room.

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Uptime Robot Configuration:

In order for this to work we’ll have to finish the work on the UpTimeRobot portal

Inside Uptime Robot, create a new alert contact in My Settings>Alert Contacts>Add new>Google Hangouts Chat using the previously created Hangouts Chat web-hook URL.

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When we choose the Google Hangouts Chat, We will have to give the following:

  • Friendly name for the monitor.
  • Provide the webhook URL which was created previously.
  • You can add a custom message to identify something related to the monitoring.
  • Enable notifications for, You can choose to get notifications only when the site/service is up or down or both.

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After adding this, You need to download one or two apps to get alerts to your Cell Phone:

  • Google Chat
  • UPtime Robot

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What do Alerts Look like?

As soon as your system goes down, Google Chat will sends you a push notification to your phone, if you’re using UpTime Robot and you’re logged in to the account then you’ll get another identical notification at the same time indicating your system’s status if it goes down or back up.

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Like this you can add up to 50 monitors including all kinds of services, ports, protocols.

The notification also comes with an interesting tone so you could easily tell if the sound is for “System Down” or “System is up” kind of state.

This has personally helped me keep my system up 24/7 and interfere whenever there’s any downtime noticed.

I hope this article helps and in case you have any question please leave a comment or get in touch with me info@moh10ly.com

References:

https://blog.uptimerobot.com/new-feature-google-hangouts-chat-notifications/

https://chat.google.com/u/1/

DOT/H Google Launches Secure DNS but not supported by Chrome yet

You might have heard that very recently Google has launched their DNS over TLS which is based on their Google Public DNS service the most commonly used DNS recursive resolver worldwide.

In a statement Google published the following article

https://security.googleblog.com/2019/01/google-public-dns-now-supports-dns-over.html

 

Google Public DNS is the world’s largest public Domain Name Service (DNS) recursive resolver, allowing anyone to convert Internet domain names like www.example.com into Internet addresses needed by an email application or web browser. Just as your search queries can expose sensitive information, the domains you lookup via DNS can also be sensitive. Starting today, users can secure queries between their devices and Google Public DNS with DNS-over-TLS, preserving their privacy and integrity.

 

(DOH) Support for Google Chrome

Although the service is now available however, you still can’t use it on your Windows 10 OS since Microsoft didn’t add the support yet. Linux OS like Ubuntu supports DOT.

 

Alternative Browsers with DOH support

Firefox’s Nightly browser which is dedicated to power users or developers already have the support for DNS over HTTPS (DOH) and upon testing it I could clearly see no indication of any plain text in my wireshark traffic for the websites that I have visited.

I used Godaddy.com as an example to see if whether Wireshark would show the requested website in the DNS filtered traffic. Using Firefox Nightly, didn’t show any DNS result in Wireshark.

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Checking result with Chrome

visiting Godaddy.com on Chrome gave a different result. Here everything is clear text. Although I am using Simple DNScrypt app but still exposes the DNS traffic.

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Even if I changed the DNS settings on my NIC to 1.1.1.1 (cloudflare’s DOT) it would still show the result on Wireshark.

 

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On November 3rd 2018, Chromium released the following article stating:

 

Add DoH UI setting. This CL adds a UI setting allowing users to enable DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Users may select a DoH server from a dropdown menu of preapproved options or enter a DoH server of their choosing. Bug: 878582 Test: out/Default/chrome –enable-features=”SecureDnsSetting” Cq-Include-Trybots: luci.chromium.try:linux_mojo Change-Id: I1138c3b8e77aea10a0d4e8a542b889a285a1a492

 

How to secure your Windows 10 ? 

Lots of tools out there that support Dns over TLS, one of them is dns simple DNSCrypt which uses the protocol dnscrypt. The application can be used temporarily or as a service. 

Windows 10 

I have installed the tool on my Windows 10 as a service and ran a test to see if resolving Google or any other domain would come as clear text but result was negative. 

The app uses various range of DNS recursive resolver services like Google, Cloudflare, Freesta… etc 

To Encrypt your DNS traffic, use Simple DNSCrypt